An Old Debt

by Doriana Cantoni

  "But by now you were in the same group of people," said Lene.

  "He didn't want me at any cost, he even threatened to leave, in case I came in. The others had to vote to decide whether to admit me, and even his wife voted against him," Toft replied hastily, without realizing he had just confirmed Poulsen's assumption that both the Mertens were part of that group of extremists.

  "How did the Mertens get in there?"

  "They had started the group with Jonas Krogh. At first they would meet at the Mertens' house, just to have a chat, then Jonas got the idea to make those meetings a more serious thing. Anyway, I think that Mertens knew the sergeant before he was sent to Torslunde, even if they didn't want to say it. Only once, after drinking a lot, Lassen mentioned something about a hunting trip they had done a long time before with another friend, but it was the only time I heard him talking like that. Those two were always very secretive about where and when they had met. There was no way to make them talk."

  As soon as Officer Toft had finished pronouncing the last sentence, Lene looked at the inspector for a long moment. It was her way of leaving the field open for him in the questioning, and in fact Petersen intervened immediately.

  "Do you have anything else to tell us about the Mertens?" he asked him.

  "Not about him, except that he’s always been a bastard, but his wife is a good person instead."

  "Are you sure? Your colleague told us she’s always acted a bit weird, and eight years ago there was a cat’s carnage that was almost certainly planned by her."

  "But then you believed all the bullshit Jens told you," Toft said, laughing and bursting. "As the others told me, Mertens bragged for years that he had exterminated those poor cats alone, the great warrior."

  "Was it him?" asked Petersen, astounded.

  "That's right!"

  "I'll have to go back to talking to this brave citizen."

  "His wife has always been very submissive, and I wouldn't swear he didn’t beat her up, but none of us would say anything about that, since he's her husband," the boy added.

  "Do you know if Else Mertens is suffering from nervous breakdowns or is that another lie?"

  "I would opt for the second answer. In my opinion, she's healthier in her head than all of us," said Ole, smiling to himself.

  "All right, that's all for now. Tonight think carefully on the list I asked you about the other people who were involved in your meetings. We're gonna put you in a cell next to Holst. Unfortunately, we can’t do anything else. You decide how to act, I suggest you don't listen to him. Tomorrow morning you’ll be taken to the police station in Copenhagen. You can ask for a lawyer, and then you will be questioned by a magistrate. As I've already told you, it's important that you cooperate, so that you can get away with it. If you want to warn someone at home that you're being held here, you can call. We'll tell Holst afterwards."

  "My parents know that sometimes I stay late at the office. I prefer them to find out that I got into trouble as late as possible. I'll call them tomorrow morning," the boy replied before he was taken to his cell.

  "It's a really a bad thing," Janssen said as soon as he came back.

  "What does Holst do?"

  "He silenced himself, maybe because he understood the seriousness of the situation. He just said he'd warn his wife later."

  "I'm afraid it's going to be a long night, long and difficult," said Petersen checking the wall clock. It was only 6:00 p.m.

  "How do we organize?" asked Poulsen.

  "I'll call the superintendent right away to have him send in some support officers. In these circumstances, we can't move unless someone comes here to cover our backs."

  "So we're not going to check Lassen's house?" Søren asked.

  "Not you two alone with those extremists waiting out there. Holst told us some big lies, but even his partner Toft is not different. I don't trust him either, especially when he talks about that group of right-wing extremists as good people, patriots. We don't know how many there are or whether they’re armed, but they're definitely dangerous. Without a good armed support, you do not move. At this point we would have to go to Lassen, to Krogh's farm and to the Mertens. And then we have to decide what to do with Svend Karlsen's disappearance. His father hasn't called us yet, and this just means one thing, that the boy hasn't come home yet," Petersen said, beginning to dial the number of the central police station in Copenhagen.

  Nielsen answered immediately and seemed worried. "I was going to call you, Lars. I have some important news, and you won't like it," he said.

  "What is it?"

  "This is about the case you're following, which is a lot worse than we thought. The Prime Minister himself has called the Chief of Police into his offices in an hour. Overgaard has just asked me to go with him, as the investigation is in the hands of our police station. Once the meeting's over, I'll be able to tell you more."

  "Do you have any clues what this is about yet?"

  "In confidence, I can tell you that Bishop Madsen received today a letter sent to him by Pastor Knudsen before he was killed. Looks like what's on it is pretty explosive. The Prime Minister, as soon as he had it in his hands, immediately summoned the Chief of Police, although I have no idea what its content is," said the superintendent.

  "I think it has something to do with the war period. Here we discovered a network of new members of the extreme right movement, and it seems that Knudsen was also a Nazi sympathizer during the occupation. Then he must have redeemed himself, so it may be that some of the fanatics that he frequented at the time found him, deciding to make him pay off the old debts."

  "Are you sure about this?"

  "Pretty sure, sadly. We have not yet identified all the members of this new group, but I must tell you that Sergeant Lassen, who is still on the loose, and the two officers in charge of this precinct are heavily involved. They tried to throw us all off the rails, and eventually I had to arrest them."

  "Did you put them in the cell?"

  "There was no other way. They could contaminate the evidence, by continuing to lie to us, and they have strong ties with the other members of this kind of new brotherhood. One of them is a retired old colonel quite prominent around here."

  "Even a retired colonel. We're not lacking anything," sighed Nielsen.

  "Listen to me, Kurt. I don't know how many they are, but surely they are dangerous subjects and they can be armed. Last night a boy disappeared here in Torslunde from the main square without a trace. After what you told me about the letter that Knudsen sent, I suspect he may have seen something compromising, and I fear for his fate. I urgently need men to go and check a couple of houses and then organize the search for the boy, strong people ready for the fight."

  "I fully understand the problem. I'll send you two teams right away, one for support and the other for breaking through. With them at your side, you don't run any risk. You'll see them coming in an hour at the most, you know they're moving fast. As soon as I'm done with the minister, I'll join you, too. We need to get this thing sorted out quickly and cleanly."

  "All right, Kurt, thank you. Then we'll wait for you," said Petersen, hanging up.

  In order for Kurt Nielsen to decide to get back in action, the situation had to be very serious.

  Janssen and Poulsen were watching the inspector in silence, waiting for him to explain what was going on, but Lars just said, "The reinforcements are coming."

  CHAPTER 12

  The boy was tied hands and feet but fortunately not gagged, although he had already used all the breath he had in his body several hours before to scream and ask for help in vain. The only thing he had achieved getting agitated in that way was to almost lose his voice in an attempt to make himself heard.

  He was in a basement poorly lit by a single light bulb connected to an electric wire that came down from the ceiling in a point right in the middle of the room almost bare. Along the left wall, a wooden staircase led to the room above.

  At a certain moment of that lo
ng night, or perhaps it was already morning, he had become paranoid that the light was about to blow out, leaving him in the dark. For this reason, he had begun to stare at it obsessively, as if the terrified gaze with which he controlled it could prevent it from burning itself.

  Svend was afraid of the dark since he was a child, although he had never told anyone so, as not to be made fun of unnecessarily. Only his mother knew, but she could be trusted.

  He suddenly thought of her face, of how tender she had always been towards him, and he felt like crying. He had again panicked, it often happened to him for nothing, and he became certain that he would not return home.

  "Just because I stopped for a cigarette. It is really true that smoke kills, as my father keeps saying," he thought to himself, and he even laughed at his joke, but in reality it had gone exactly that way.

  Once his friend had left him in the big square that evening, he decided to smoke his last cigarette in peace without being yelled at and stopped under the porches to watch the snow. There was no one on the streets, and the noise was muffled by all that white. For a moment, he had the feeling that the city belonged to him, even if only because he could smoke in peace.

  He had been of age for a few months, yet nothing had changed, no extra freedom as he had hoped. He had to come back home before midnight, and his father kept throwing away the cigarettes he found in his pockets. He said that with that stuff he would burn his lungs, not caring about the money that he made him waste every time. However, it was his own home, and the son had to obey in order to avoid endless discussions or even more damage.

  Not that his father had ever beaten him up, but he had threatened to do so several times when he was a child, and the thought of that big man with the belt in his hand had made him sleep badly for several nights.

  That evening he had leaned against the outer wall of one of the most distant shops which was almost at the entrance to the little street that he walked every night to go home, and he had lit up his cigarette. A very bad decision, as he only realized later.

  His head still hurt at the point where he was hit, but he didn't understand who could have done it, since Sergeant Lassen, who he had seen preparing himself to burglarize the mailbox looking around as if he were an experienced thief, was at least twenty meters away.

  He must have had an accomplice who had surprised him from behind, there was no other logical explanation, thought the boy. When he woke up, he was already in that place, tied with a rope to his hands and feet, so that he could not escape. As much as he screamed, he couldn't get anyone's attention.

  There was no light filtering through the room, so he got convinced that it had to be the cellar of a house isolated from the others, perhaps even that of Lassen.

  Upstairs, he had heard noises in the last hour, like someone walking nervously back and forth. Whoever the man was, he hadn't shown up, even when he had screamed that he had to go to the bathroom urgently, or that he was freezing from the cold in that place so humid, but maybe it was just a good thing that they had left him alone.

  After a while, he hadn’t heard a thing, as if he had been left alone in the house, and then he had tried to free himself, but the knots were too tight.

  "You finally got here. I've been waiting for you since this morning. What’s the news from Copenhagen?" said someone half an hour later, and then Svend realized that probably the man had never moved from the room upstairs, even if at some point he had stopped making noise. He couldn't have sworn it, but it sounded like the sergeant's voice.

  "Not good ones, since I couldn't get the letter back. That damn bishop keeps the studio door locked, and I was unable to make it disappear. By now, it will have already been read," said the newcomer.

  "What do we do?"

  "We have to leave as soon as possible, there's nothing else to do. They'll come looking for us soon. I've already shut down all my business and Michael's done the same. He's about to join us, then we'll leave."

  "Is he coming alone?" asked in amazement the one Svend had now identified as Lassen.

  "Unfortunately, the wife is unable to leave," said the other man with a hint of cruelty in his voice.

  "What did you do to her?"

  "I just shut her up. She told the inspector in charge of the case that she had seen my pick-up near the church, and she would soon be talking, accusing me. Yesterday she saw me coming, it’s why she went to church with Michael, but it was too late."

  "Did you really have to kill that priest?"

  "I already told you that it was not my aim, but he didn’t want to be reasonable at all. In all these years, I never suspected Jesper was so close. When he told me about the letter and the fact that it was over for me by now, my old temperament took over, and I made him pay his debt. It is difficult to control one's own demons, but they are our purest part as our beloved Führer always used to say."

  "All right, but Else wouldn't be a danger to us now," replied Lassen.

  "She knew too much, and then she had betrayed me," said the other one in a tone that didn't allow replicas.

  "What do you think you're doing with the boy down here instead? I don't even know why you wanted to take him to my house."

  "He had seen your face as you were breaking into the mailbox where we thought it was the letter sent from Jesper. Have you forgotten about it?"

  "I could just tell him a story and he'd believe me."

  "I doubt it, but at this point we'll never know."

  "Let's leave him here. Sooner or later, they'll come after me at my place, and in this way they’ll find him," said the sergeant.

  "I suppose we could do that, but it's not my habit to leave behind witnesses who are still alive and ready to talk. It's a matter of principle," said the other man in an almost amused tone of voice.

  Svend immediately understood that he would never let him go and tried again to free himself with all his might but uselessly. The knots were too tight, and he would not loosen them even if he broke his wrists, so he broke down, crying like a child.

  "Do you want to kill him?"

  "You're going to do it. You haven't given me any proof of loyalty yet, and I want to see what you're made of before I take you with me."

  "I'm not up for it. If that's what you want, leave me here, too," Lassen said after a long silence.

  "Too bad, it’s the wrong answer" replied the other voice. Immediately after, Svend heard the detonation of a weapon.

  The next few minutes passed in an agonizing wait. The boy didn't hear anything from above, and for a moment he had the illusion that the stranger had left after killing the sergeant, but then the voices started talking again.

  "What happened to Morten? Why did you shoot him?" asked a man who must have just entered the room upstairs, almost certainly that Michael they had talked about just before.

  "I asked him to do something for me, but he refused. You know I hate cowards," said the other one.

  "He was a friend of mine."

  "You'll live with that. Anyway, now there's a little problem. The boy we hid downstairs is still alive."

  "Svend? Didn't we decide to let him live since we have to run out of the country?"

  "I changed my mind, and your friend didn't agree."

  " Do you want to shut him up?"

  "Like I said earlier to Lassen, I don't want to be the one to do it. Consider it a proof of loyalty."

  "Give me the weapon," said the newcomer.

  "Very well, I see I was not wrong about you. Be careful, he must be awake and has heard it all."

  "Too bad for him," said the voice.

  Svend had begun to pray when he heard the door of the cellar that opened with a prolonged squeaking, then it came down the man he knew was going to kill him. He had the time to recognize him. It was Colonel Mertens, a man he had always admired.

  "Sorry, kid," he said and then shot him in the head.

  Meanwhile, in the police precinct Inspector Petersen was making an assessment of the situation with the men of
the two teams that Superintendent Niensen had sent him from Copenhagen.

  The first team consisted of four officers with several years of experience, while the second was made up of five officers under the command of Inspector Thorsen. They were men with military training, usually employed in counter-terrorism operations or when you had to free hostages, and they knew how to behave in the event of a firefight.

  "I'd say to do it this way. You, Inspector Thomsen, will go with your unit to check Jonas Krogh's farm and then Sergeant Lassen's cottage which is not far away. The first one is a right-wing fanatic who lives secluded with his three sons, while we have lost track of the sergeant since this morning. He may not be at home, or he can be hidden right there and be in the company of other extremists. Janssen will come with you. He knows how to handle these situations, and in the past he was part of a chosen unit of the army," said Petersen.

  "What are we looking for?" asked Thomsen.

  "I'm afraid they've got a hostage with them, a young boy who's been missing from his house since last night. Here is one of his pictures, so you can recognize him."

  "Do you suspect they're dangerous subjects?"

  "I could swear on that and they might be armed, as far as we know."

  "I understand the situation perfectly. I need to talk to your man to have him explain how this Krogh's farm is, then we leave right away. We'll keep up to date on the radio," Thomsen said, getting a few steps away with his team.

  "You, Poulsen, will come with me and a couple of other officers to the Mertens' house. I want to clear up the story of the pick-up that the wife saw and put Mertens in a corner, now that we know that they are both part of that subversive group. I'm leaving only two officers here to check on the prisoners, and they'll also welcome Superintendent Nielsen," said the inspector again.

  "Is he coming too?" she asked, surprised.

  "Yes. I didn’t tell you about it before, because I know little about it, but he went with the Chief of Police to the Prime Minister who wanted to meet them to share vital information on this case. When they’re done, he’ll come here to support us. The investigation, as I understand it, has become of national importance."