The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  The scum.

  An hour and fifty-eight minutes and forty seconds earlier he had stepped out of the lift on the second floor and left Nete gasping for air, hands clenched into fists. During the long minutes that followed she sensed nothing. Rode up and down in the lift without reacting to the concerned inquiries of other customers. It was all she could do to calm her pounding heart and gather her thoughts.

  When once again she found herself outside on the street she no longer had the plastic bag in her hand. Who needed a pink sweater and a blouse with shoulder pads where life was taking her now?

  And now she sat in her fourth-floor apartment, naked and desecrated in heart and soul, wondering how revenge could be taken, and against whom.

  She smiled for a second, musing that perhaps she had not been the unfortunate one after all. Perhaps it was the despicable monster fate had sent into her path in this sublime chance encounter.

  That was how she felt during the first hours after Curt Wad had once more entered her life.

  • • •

  When the summer came, her cousin Tage came, too. An unmanageable tyke neither the school nor the streets of Assens could contain. “Too much brawn, too little brain,” said her uncle, but Nete loved it when he came to stay. It meant there was someone to help her while away the daylight hours for a few weeks. Feeding hens was fine for a small girl, but not the other jobs. Tage loved to get his hands dirty, so the pigsty and the little cowshed became his domain. Only when Tage was with them could she go to bed at night without her arms and legs aching from work, and for that she adored him.

  Perhaps she adored him rather too much.

  “Whoever taught you such foul language?” the schoolmistress barked, after the summer holiday. And it was always after the summer holiday that she was punished the hardest, for Tage’s favorite words, like “fuck” and “shag” and “boner,” were far removed from the lonely world the mistress inhabited.

  It was words such as these, and Tage’s freckled abandon, that laid the first stones on the path that led to Curt Wad.

  Smooth, slippery stones.

  • • •

  She got up from the stool and put on her clothes as the list took shape in her mind. The list that opened the pores of her skin and smoothed the furrows of her brow.

  There were people in the world who deserved not to breathe. People who strove only toward their own selfish goals and never looked back at the destruction they left in their wake. A few came to mind. The question was, what price should they be made to pay in consequence?

  She walked down the long hallway and into the room at the end, where the table she had inherited from her father stood. At least a thousand meals had been consumed at that table, her father prodding at his food, silent and bitter, weary of life and all its pain. On rare occasions he had looked up to send her a fatigued smile. It was all he could muster.

  Had it not been for her, he would have found himself a length of rope and hanged himself years before he eventually did. Such was the toll of arthritis, loneliness, and barrenness of mind.

  She caressed the dark edge on which his arms had always rested and moved her fingers into the middle where the brown envelope had lain ever since she had moved in two years before.

  It was worn and creased from the innumerable times she had opened it and studied its contents.

  “Miss Nete Hermansen, Laboratory Assistant, Århus Technical College, Halmstadgade, Århus N,” read the address on the envelope. The postal services had added the street number and the postcode in red pen. She had felt grateful to them many a time since.

  She ran her fingers gently over the stamp and postmark. Almost seventeen years had passed since it had come through her mailbox. A whole life away.

  Then she opened the envelope, took out the letter, and unfolded it.

  Dearest Nete

  In the most remarkable and unfathomable of ways, the veil has now been lifted on what has become of you since you got onto the train at Bredebro station and waved good-bye to us with such a happy smile.

  I wish you to know that everything I have now learned about your passage through life these past six years has gladdened me more than I can ever express.

  Now surely you must know that you are good enough. Am I right? Your reading handicap could indeed be overcome and there was a place for you in life after all. And such a place! I am so very proud of you, dear Nete. Grammar school with top marks. Your training as a laboratory assistant at the Aabenraa Technical College where you finished top of your class. And now soon to complete your course of study as a biological laboratory technician in Århus. So very well done indeed! Perhaps you are wondering how all this has come to my attention, in which case I can reveal to you the most singular coincidence that Interlab A/S, the company that has taken you into its employment as of 1 January, was founded by my old friend, Christopher Hale. Moreover, his son, Daniel, is my godson. We meet often, most recently on the occasion of our annual family get-together on the first Sunday of Advent, under the pretext of making decorations and baking cookies in preparation for the festive season.

  I inquired of my friend what matters were occupying him at the time, and, would you believe, he informed me he had just finished reading through a formidable number of job applications, upon which he proceeded to show me the one he had selected. Can you imagine my surprise on seeing your name? And, if you will excuse my indiscretion, upon reading your letter of application and curriculum vitae? I must honestly admit to shedding tears of joy.

  Now, Nete, I shall not burden you further with the sentiment of an old man. Suffice to say that Marianne and I are so very happy on your behalf. Know that you may now stand proud and declare to all the world that little sentence we composed so many years ago: I am good enough!

  REMEMBER that, my dear!

  We wish you all joy and happiness in your further passage through life.

  Our most heartfelt greetings

  Marianne and Erik Hanstholm

  Bredebro, 14 December 1970

  Three times she read the letter through, and three times she paused at the words: “Now surely you must know that you are good enough.”

  “I’m good enough!” she said out loud, picturing Erik Hanstholm’s face lined by laughter. The first time she had uttered the sentence she had been just twenty-four years old, and now she was fifty. Where had all the years gone? If only she had got in touch with him before it was too late.

  She breathed deeply, tipped her head, and noted the slant of the characters, the capital letters, and every little inkblot his fountain pen had left each time he paused.

  Then she took a second sheet of paper out of the envelope and sat for a while, looking at it with tears in her eyes. There had been many diplomas and exam certificates since then, but this was the first and most momentous. Erik Hanstholm had made it for her, generous as always.

  DIPLOMA, it read at the top, the word written in curly letters, and underneath it four lines covering the entire sheet: No one who can read this can be called illiterate.

  That was all it said.

  She dried her eyes and pressed her lips together. How thoughtless and selfish of her never to have got in touch. What would have become of her if it hadn’t been for him and his wife, Marianne? And now it was too late. Passed away after a lengthy illness, the obituary notice had said three years ago.

  “After a lengthy illness,” whatever that meant.

  She had written to Marianne Hanstholm to offer her condolences, only for her letters to be returned. Perhaps she was no more either, Nete had thought at the time. So who was left now, besides those who had destroyed her life?

  Nobody.

  Nete folded the letter and the diploma and put them back in the envelope. Then she went over to the windowsill where she put the brown envelope down on a tin plate.

  When she set fire to it and the sm
oke rose up to the stucco molding on the ceiling she felt all shame to be gone for the first time since the accident.

  She waited until the glow was extinguished and rubbed the remains to powder between her fingers. Then she carried the plate into the living room and stood for a moment at the windowsill there, regarding the plant with the sticky bristles. Its smell wasn’t quite as pungent today.

  She sprinkled the ashes into the flowerpot and turned to the bureau.

  Atop this fine piece of furniture was a stack of envelopes and matching floral writing paper. The kind of hostess gift that was just as inevitable as candles and cloth doilies. She took six of these envelopes, sat down at the dining table, and wrote a name on each.

  Curt Wad, Rita Nielsen, Gitte Charles, Tage Hermansen, Viggo Mogensen, and Philip Nørvig.

  One name for each point of her life when things had gone off in the wrong direction.

  As the names lay there in front of her they seemed anything but significant. Inconsequential, even. People who could be deleted from one’s life by the stroke of a pen. But reality was another matter. The names were of the utmost substance. And their importance resided primarily in the fact that these individuals, to the extent that they were still alive, were walking around as free as Curt Wad. Not giving a moment’s thought to the past and the slimy traces their passage through life had left behind them.

  But she would make them stop and look back. And she would do it in her own devious way.

  She picked up the phone and dialed the number of the Civil Registration Office.

  “Good afternoon,” she began. “My name is Nete Hermansen. Would you be kind enough to tell me how I can get in touch with some old acquaintances of mine? The addresses I have here seem to be rather out-of-date.”

  7

  November 2010

  The wind was capricious, and even from a distance Carl sensed the stench of a corpse hanging densely in the damp autumn air.

  Behind a pair of bulldozers with lowered shovels, white-clad homicide police were conferring with forensic technicians.

  It seemed they’d reached the point where they could hand over to the ambulance crew and orderlies from the Department of Forensic Medicine to cart off the remains.

  Terje Ploug stood with a folder under his arm, puffing away on his pipe, and Marcus Jacobsen had a cigarette in his mouth. Not that smoke helped much. The poor bastard who had been laid so improperly to rest had long since reached a state of total decomposition, more malodorous than anything else on earth. As such it seemed somehow fortunate that the olfactory organs of the majority of those present were well and truly bunged up.

  Carl stepped closer with nostrils pinched and stared at the box that was still in the ground, though almost fully excavated, its lid open. It wasn’t as big as he’d imagined. Three-quarters of a meter square, but ample enough to contain a dismembered body. It was solidly made, put together from disused tongue-and-groove floorboards that had been varnished. Certainly a casket that could have stayed in the ground for years before disintegrating.

  “How come they didn’t just chuck the body straight in the hole?” Carl mused, as he stood on the edge of the excavation. “And why here, exactly?” He threw out his hands to indicate the surrounding area. “I mean, they weren’t exactly short of options, were they?”

  “We’ve had a look at the floor they pulled up from the shed.” The chief drew his scarf tighter around the collar of his leather jacket and pointed toward a heap of boards behind some building workers in orange overalls.

  “So now we’ve a fairly exact idea as to where they lowered the box down,” Jacobsen went on. “Almost in the corner by the south wall, the hole cut out with a circular saw not that long ago. Crime scene boys reckon within the last five years.”

  Carl nodded. “OK. So the victim was killed and chopped up somewhere else and then transported here.”

  “Looks like it, anyway,” said Jacobsen with a sniffle, his features momentarily shrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Maybe a reminder to Georg Madsen to behave himself a bit better than the poor sod lying there.”

  Terje Ploug nodded. “The SOCOs are saying the box was definitely buried under the area with the hole cut out, in the main room. As far as I can make out from the sketch in the report here”—he indicated a floor plan from his folder—“that would have been directly underneath the chair where you lot found Georg Madsen with the nail through his head. The spot where you got shot.”

  Carl straightened his back. It wasn’t the kind of information likely to bring a Wednesday morning in November into the top flight. There was little doubt that ahead of them lay hundreds of hours of investigation and poking around in events Carl preferred to forget. If it was down to him he’d kick it into touch right now, drive out to the Airport Grill, get a couple of hot dogs and plenty of ketchup, and keep a nice, easy eye on the clock until three or four hours had passed and it was time for him to go home and get ready for his Martinmas goose at Mona’s.

  Ploug stood gawping at him as though he could read his mind.

  “OK,” said Carl. “Let’s say we know the guy was killed somewhere else and most likely buried under Georg Madsen’s floor with his knowledge. Now, what details might be missing?”

  He scratched his head theatrically before proffering his own answer. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. We don’t know who he is, we’ve no idea why he got bumped off, and we haven’t a clue who did it. Piece of cake, I’d say! But you’ll have that sorted in no time, won’t you, Ploug?” Carl grunted. He felt loathing kick in.

  Here, two years earlier on this miserable patch of ground, he had nearly lost his life. Here the ambulance crews had driven away with Anker’s dead body and Hardy’s crippled one. Here Carl had fallen short and lain wounded on the floor, paralyzed by fear like some terrified animal, while their assailants made short work of his mates. And when this box made its final journey to forensics in just a short while from now, all tangible evidence of those events would be removed from the face of the earth. It felt right and wrong all at once.

  “I think you’re correct inasmuch as we can assume this took place with Georg Madsen’s knowledge, but if burying the body was meant as a warning, I think we can take it for granted he didn’t pay much heed,” the chief commented.

  Carl stared at the open box.

  The skull was on its side on top of one of the black bin liners that still contained the rest of the body parts. Judging by the size of the cranium, the prominent jaw, and the healed fracture on the bridge of the nose, the victim was not only male, but also a man who had most likely seen his share of trouble. Now here he lay, toothless, his scalp a loose mat of rotten flesh, and from this slimy, decomposed mass protruded the head of a large galvanized nail. A nail seemingly of the same kind found in the skulls of Georg Madsen and the two mechanics at the auto repair shop down in Sorø.

  Jacobsen pulled off his scene suit and nodded to the police photographers. “In a couple of hours we’ll go through the contents of the box over at forensics. That should tell us if we’ve anything to go on that might help us identify the victim,” he said by way of conclusion, and began making his way back to his car.

  “You write the report, Ploug,” he shouted back over his shoulder.

  Carl withdrew a few meters and tried to filter out the stench of dead body with a couple of deep breaths in the close vicinity of Ploug’s smoldering pipe.

  “What the hell was the point of dragging me out here, Terje?” he asked. “To see if I was going to break down?”

  Ploug returned the question with weary eyes. He didn’t give a shit if Carl broke down or not.

  “As far as I remember, the neighbor’s place was just about there,” he said, indicating an adjoining patch of ground. “He must have heard or seen people lugging a big box into next door’s, not to mention the sound of a saw tearing Georg Madsen’s floorboards apart, wouldn’t you th
ink? Do you remember him saying anything about it?”

  Carl smiled. “Listen, Ploug. The neighbor had only had the place for ten days before Georg Madsen was done in, so he never knew the bloke. As far as I and the SOCOs can tell from that foul-smelling pile of flesh and bones there, the body’s been in the ground at least five years. In other words, three years before Georg Madsen got knocked off. So how the fuck was the neighbor supposed to know anything? Anyway, weren’t you the one who took charge of the investigation after they sent me off to the hospital? Didn’t you speak to him yourself?”

  “No, the bloke dropped dead from a heart attack the same day, didn’t he? Popped his clogs right over there by the curb while we were packing up our gear. The murder and the circumstances surrounding it were too much for him, not to mention our lot milling about all of a sudden.”

  Carl thrust out his lower lip. Christ on a bike, was there no end to the lives these fuckers had on their conscience?

  “You didn’t know that, did you?” Ploug pulled his notebook out of his inside pocket. “In that case you probably haven’t heard either that we’ve had information from the Netherlands about some similar killings. May and September of last year. A tower-block estate outside Rotterdam called Schiedam. Two blokes, both done in with a nail gun. They sent us a pile of photos.”

  He opened his folder and pulled out a series of images of the two men’s skulls while a pair of officers cordoned off the scene with tape.

  “Ninety-millimeter Paslode nail through the temple, same as here. I’ll send you copies of the relevant documents once we get back. We can go through it when the report comes in from forensics.”

  OK, Carl thought to himself. Hardy’s brains were in for some exercise.

  • • •

  He found Lis outside Rose’s office with her arms folded beneath her bosom, nodding eagerly, fully engrossed in Rose’s natter about life in general, and in the basement in particular. He picked up snippets—“like the bloody grave,” “miserable as sin,” and “thinks he’s God’s gift”—and was in total agreement until he realized she was talking about him.