The Purity of Vengeance (46 page)

Wad’s reaction now was crucial. All Carl’s experience told him so. For no matter how minuscule the response, it would be his guideline as to what strategy to employ in dealing with this fossilized felon. Would he grasp the opportunity to come clean and save the party, or would he try to save himself? Carl was most inclined to believe the latter.

But Wad didn’t react at all.

Carl looked at Assad. Was he thinking the same thing? That in Curt Wad’s eyes, doing a deal in the Nørvig case was no exchange for The Cause. He wasn’t going to cop it for the lesser crime, regardless that it might save him going down for the greater one. Hardened criminals wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment, but Wad wasn’t buying. Maybe he didn’t have anything to do with their missing persons at all? The possibility couldn’t be ruled out. Or was he so much shrewder than Carl realized?

For the moment, they were no further.

“Caspersen still works for you, doesn’t he? Just like he did when you and Lønberg and others in the Purity Party destroyed the lives of all those innocent people?”

Wad didn’t flinch. Assad, on the other hand, was about to blow.

“You realize of course that purity means being pure, especially in moral behavior? You stupid old man!” he seethed.

Carl noted that no matter how innocent Assad’s charge, it seemed to hit home. The comment appeared to have the old man riled more than all the others put together. Being lectured in semantics by this pushy little foreigner was an unspeakable provocation, that much was plain.

“What’s the name of your driver, the one with the white hair who left that gas cylinder at my place?” Carl continued, piling on the pressure. And then, finally: “Do you remember Nete Hermansen?”

Wad sat up. “I must ask you to leave at once.” So now he was getting formal again. “My wife is dying and I must ask you to leave now and respect the fact that these are our last hours together.”

“The way you respected Nete when you had her shipped out to the island? The way you respected the women who couldn’t meet your sick, degenerate standards, whose children you murdered before they were even born?” Carl spat out the words with the same smirk on his face as Wad had used.

“How dare you even try to compare such things?” Wad got to his feet. “I’ve had enough of this hypocrisy.” He stepped toward Assad. “And you imagine you can bring your foul Arab urchins into the world and call them Danes? You worthless, ugly little raghead!”

“Ah, so there we have it.” Assad smiled. “The beast within. The ugly underside of Curt Wad.”

“Get out of here, you bloody camel fucker! Back to your own country where you belong!”

He turned to Carl. “Yes, I played a part in sending antisocial, feeble-minded girls with deviant sexual tendencies to Sprogø. Yes, they were sterilized. And you would do well to thank me for not having to contend with their offspring running around the streets like rats, for I can assure you the police would be at a loss as to what to do about their feral behavior. To hell with the both of you! If I’d been a younger man, I swear . . .”

He raised his fists toward them. Assad was clearly willing to let him have a go. Wad looked considerably frailer now than on TV. The sight of him was almost comical. This old man, squaring his shoulders for fisticuffs in a living room displaying a lifetime’s clutter of furnishing styles. But Carl knew better. Appearances deceived, and the man’s frailty extended only to his body. Wad’s weapon was his brain, and his brain was intact. The man was ruthless and driven by malice.

So Carl took his assistant by the collar and led him out through the back door.

“They’ll get him sooner or later, Assad, don’t you worry,” he assured him, as they trudged along Brøndbyøstervej toward the S-train station.

But Assad was having none of it.

“
They?
” he spluttered. “You say
they
and not
we
? Who are
they
who will stop him? Curt Wad is eighty-eight years old, Carl. No one will get him before Allah himself, unless we do.”

 • • • 

They didn’t say much on the way back. Each was lost in thought.

“Did you notice the arrogance of this bastard? The house did not even have a burglar alarm,” said Assad at one point. “A person could break in there in a jiffy. What is more, somebody ought to before Wad destroys important evidence. I think he will do this for certain, Carl.”

He didn’t specify who that somebody might be.

“Don’t even think about it, Assad,” Carl replied. “One break-in a week is more than enough.” There seemed little reason to elaborate, so he left it at that.

They had only been back at HQ for five minutes when Rose came into Carl’s office with a sheet of paper in her hand.

“This was in the fax machine. It’s for Assad,” she said. “From Lithuania, as far as I can make out. Pretty gruesome photo, don’t you think? Any idea why they might have sent it to us?”

Carl glanced at the image and felt his blood run cold.

“Assad, get in here!” he hollered.

It took a bit longer than usual. It had been a hard day.

“Yes, what is it?” he asked, when he eventually slunk in.

Carl pointed to the fax.

“Recognize the tattoo, Assad?”

Assad studied the dragon that had been divided in two by the near severance of Linas Verslovas’s head. The face of the man whose acid attack had disfigured Børge Bak’s sister was captured in an expression of simultaneous fear and astonishment.

Assad’s was rather more composed.

“This is unfortunate,” he said. “But I have nothing to do with it, Carl.”

“So you don’t think this might be your doing in some way, directly or indirectly?” Carl asked, slapping the fax down on the desk. His nerves were frayed, too. It was hardly surprising.

“A person can never know about indirectly. But this is not something I did on purpose.”

Carl fumbled around for his cigarettes. He needed a smoke and he needed one now. “No, I don’t believe you did either, Assad. But why the hell would the Lithuanian police, or whoever the fuck it was who sent this, think you ought to be informed? And where’s my fucking lighter, have you seen it anywhere?”

“I don’t know why I should be informed, Carl. Perhaps I should call them and ask?” It was a question delivered in a tone more sarcastic than the situation warranted.

“Do you know what, Assad? I reckon it can wait. For the time being I think you should get off home, or wherever it is you go to when you’re not here, and concentrate on trying to clear your head. Because as far as I can see, you’re heading for a blow-out any time now.”

“In which case it is only strange that
you
are not, Carl. But if you insist, then I shall go.” He didn’t show it, but he was angrier than Carl had ever seen him.

And then he turned round and left, with Carl’s lighter sticking demonstratively out of his back pocket.

This did not bode well.

36

September 1987

When Nørvig’s head flopped
down onto his chest, Nete’s world was consumed by silence. Death itself had appeared before her, beckoning her unto the flames of hell. But now she was alone.

Never before had she felt it to be as close. Not even when her mother died. Not even when she lay in her hospital bed and was told her husband had been killed in the car accident.

She kneeled down in front of the chair where Philip Nørvig sat slumped, open eyes still red from weeping, no longer breathing.

Then she reached out her trembling hands to touch his clenched fingers, searching for words that could not be found. Perhaps she wanted only to say “sorry,” but somehow it didn’t seem enough.

He has a daughter, she thought, and felt a queasiness spread from her stomach to the rest of her body.

He had a daughter. These lifeless hands had a cheek they would never again caress.

“
Stop it
, Nete!” she shouted abruptly, sensing where she was leading herself. “Bastard!” she snarled at Nørvig’s corpse. Who was he to come here, repentant, and think her life would be made better on that account? Was he now to rob her of her vengeance, too? First her liberty, her fertility and motherhood, and now her triumph?

“Come here,” she mumbled, putting her arms round his torso, immediately registering the smell that filled her nostrils. He had emptied his bowels at the moment of death. More work to do. And time was short.

She looked at the clock: 4
P
.
M
. In fifteen minutes it would be Curt Wad’s turn. Although Gitte came after him, Curt would be her crowning achievement.

She pulled Nørvig from the chair and saw the malodorous brown stain of excrement on the upholstery.

Nørvig had left his final mark on her life.

 • • • 

After she had wrapped his nether regions in a bath towel and dragged him into the sealed room, she knelt at the armchair, scrubbing frantically with all the windows in the living room and kitchen thrown wide. Neither the stain nor the smell would go away, and now, at fourteen minutes past four, everything in the room, down to the minutest piece of bric-a-brac, seemed to announce to her that something in the apartment was terribly amiss.

Two minutes later, the armchair had been pushed away into the corner of the sealed room, its usual place now glaringly vacant. For a moment she thought about substituting a dining chair, only then to decide against it. She had nothing else that would do.

Curt Wad will have to sit on the sofa by the sideboard while I mix the tea and the extract, she thought. I’ll just have to stand in between so he won’t see.

Time passed and Nete stood anxiously at the window. But Curt Wad didn’t come.

 • • • 

After Nete had spent more than eighteen tormented months on the island, a man stood one day in a corner of the courtyard, photographing the view down to the sea. A gaggle of Sprogø girls were gathered around him, whispering and giggling, eyeing him up as though he were fair game. But the man was big and stout, and the occasional hand that ventured to brush against him was firmly dismissed.

He seemed to be a good sort, as her father would have said. Ruddy as a farmer and hair that shone with life and spoke of something other than crude soap flakes.

Four of the female wardens came out to waylay him, and when things seemed to be getting out of hand they shooed the girls away, back to their chores. In the meantime, Nete drew back behind the tall tree in the middle of the courtyard, waiting to see what would happen.

The man looked around, taking in the surroundings, producing a notebook and jotting down his impressions.

“Would it be possible to speak to one of the girls?” she heard him inquire. One of the women laughed and told him that if he held his virtue dear, it would be better he left the girls alone and spoke to
them
instead.

“
I’ll
behave myself,” said Nete, stepping forward wearing the smile her father always called her “twinkle.”

Right away she saw in the eyes of the staff the punishment that now awaited her.

“Go back to work,” said the one they called Weasel, the smallest of the four women, the matron’s assistant. She tried to keep it civil, but Nete knew better. Weasel was an aggrieved woman, much like her colleagues, a person who seemed to have nothing left in life but harsh words and embitterment. “A woman no man in his right mind would ever want,” Rita always said. “The kind who takes pleasure in the calamity of others.”

“No, wait,” said the man. “I’d like to speak to her. She seems harmless enough.”

Weasel snorted but said nothing.

He stepped closer. “I’m from a magazine called
Photo Report
. Do you mind if we talk?”

Nete shook her head eagerly, despite the four pairs of eyes she felt glaring at her.

The man turned back to the wardens. “Ten minutes, that’s all. Down by the jetty. Just some questions and a couple of photos. If you want, you can be on hand to intervene if it turns out I’m unable to defend myself,” he added with a chuckle.

As the women withdrew, one of them made off for the matron’s office after a nod from Weasel.

You’ve only a moment, Nete thought to herself, walking on ahead of the journalist through the passage between the buildings and down to the water.

The light seemed unusually bright that day, and at the jetty the motorboat that had sailed the reporter out to the island lay moored. She’d seen the boatman before on some occasion. He smiled and waved.

She would have given years of her life to be sailed away in that boat.

“I’m not retarded or abnormal in any way,” she explained hurriedly to the journalist, turning to face him. “I was sent here because I was raped. By a doctor called Curt Wad. You can look him up in the phone book.”

The man was immediately alert.

“Raped, you say?”

“Yes.”

“By a doctor? A Curt Wad?”

“Yes. You can check the court records. I lost the case.”

He nodded deliberately, though without making notes. Why wasn’t he putting this down?

“And your name is?”

“Nete Hermansen.”

This he jotted in his notebook. “You say you’re quite normal, and yet I happen to know for a fact that everyone here has been given a diagnosis. What might yours be?”

“Diagnosis?” She didn’t know what it meant.

He smiled. “Nete, can you tell me the name of the third largest town in Denmark?”

She turned her eyes toward the hillock and its fruit trees, knowing full well where things were heading. Three more questions and she would be pigeonholed.

“I know it’s not Odense, because that’s the second biggest,” she answered.

He nodded. “Sounds like you’re from Fyn yourself.”

“I am. I was born not far from Assens.”

“Then perhaps you can tell me about Hans Christian Andersen’s childhood home in Odense. What color is it?”

Nete shook her head. “Won’t you take me away from here? I’ll tell you such a lot of things you’ll never find out otherwise. Things no one knows.”

“Such as?”

“About the wardens. If any of them are nice to us, they’re sent back to the mainland. And if we’re disobedient, they beat us and lock us up in the contemplation rooms.”