The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Assad nodded. “Definitely because she had an appointment, I think.”

  Carl agreed. The time of her departure had been bothering him. No one leaves home at five in the morning without good reason, certainly no one of Rita Nielsen’s profession, which was mostly conducted during the night. And it was hardly likely to do with Saturday shopping hours either, so what explanation could there be, other than she had an appointment to keep?

  “Either someone met her when she got to Copenhagen, in which case whoever it was knows more about her disappearance than we do, or else she never arrived, in which case someone must have realized as much,” Carl said. “What sort of an effort was made to find her? Was it enough, do you reckon?”

  “Enough?” Assad looked at Rose, who seemed just as blank. The pair of them had obviously run out of blood sugar.

  “Yeah, enough for anyone who’d been in touch with her, or was supposed to have been, to have known about her disappearance,” said Rose.

  “But listen, Carl,” she went on, “police spent three days going from door to door. It was in all the papers. The call was put out on TV and on local and national radio, and not a soul came forward, other than that kiosk owner.”

  “So you reckon someone knew about her going missing, but kept it to themselves? And whoever knew about it might have been involved in her disappearance, is that right?”

  Rose smacked her heels together and saluted. “Indeed, sir.”

  “And now the two of you are telling me there was an unusual number of missing persons reported at about the same time and that none of them have ever been found, is that right, Assad?”

  “Yes, and now we have one more who was never found,” Assad replied. “We have asked for a whole more week of newspapers, just to be certain we are not missing something that is not on the lists we have from the police districts.”

  Carl pondered Assad’s information for a moment. “So now we’ve got a total of, what, five persons, including Rita Nielsen, who’ve never turned up? Five people in two weeks, vanished without a trace, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Bull’s-eye. In the country as a whole there were fifty-five persons reported missing during the two weeks we’ve been concentrating on, and ten months later five still hadn’t been found. And they still haven’t, twenty-three years on,” Rose said with a nod. “I’d say that must be a record, so many disappearances in such a few days.”

  Carl tried to assess the dark shadows under her eyes. Was it fa-

  tigue, or had her mascara simply been redistributed during the course of the day?

  “Let’s have a look,” he said, running his finger down Rose’s list.

  He got out a pen and crossed out one of the names. “We can forget about her, at any rate,” he said, indicating the woman’s age and the circumstances of her disappearance.

  “Yes, we think she is too old,” said Assad. “And this I say even though my father’s sister is older by two years, eighty-five this Christmas, and still she chops firewood all day long.”

  What a lot of bollocks about nothing, Carl thought to himself. “Listen, Assad! This woman here was senile. She went missing from her care home, and I’m sure she didn’t chop firewood, OK? What about the others on the list? Have you checked them out? Is there anything that might connect them with Rita Nielsen’s disappearance?”

  Here they grinned. Like a pair of bleeding kids.

  “Come on, then, let’s have it.”

  Assad gave Rose a nudge with his elbow.

  “There’s this lawyer by the name of Philip Nørvig from a law firm called Nørvig and Sønderskov in Korsør,” she began. “The day before his teenage daughter’s most important handball match of the year, Nørvig told her she’d have to take her mother along instead of him, despite the fact he’d promised to be there. All he said by way of explanation was that he had an important meeting in Copenhagen that couldn’t be put off.”

  “And then he disappeared?”

  “Yeah, he took the train from Halsskov later that same morning and would have got in to Copenhagen Central about nine thirty. After that, nothing. Vanished off the face of the earth.”

  “Anyone see him get off the train?”

  “A couple of other passengers from Korsør recognized him. He was involved in quite a number of associations in the town, so a lot of people knew who he was.”

  “I think I remember now,” said Carl, ignoring the snot he felt sliding lazily down his nostril. “Prominent lawyer in Korsør. Fairly big thing in the papers at the time. Didn’t he turn up floating around in one of the canals here in Copenhagen?”

  “No, he disappeared totally, Carl,” said Assad. “You must be thinking of another man.”

  “Was that case up on our bulletin board already, Assad?”

  Assad nodded. In which case a length of red string most likely now connected it to the Rita Nielsen case.

  “You’ve got something about it on that sheet there, I see. What’s it say about this Nørvig bloke, Rose?”

  “He was born in 1925 . . .” was as far as she got.

  “In 1925? Bloody hell!” Carl blurted out. “He must have been in his early sixties in 1987. Pretty old for the father of a teenage handball player.”

  “How about listening to the rest before butting in?” said Rose wearily. The way her eyes were beginning to blink, she reminded him of an aging female rock star trying to come on sexy from beneath a boatload of mascara. Any minute now she’d probably fall asleep.

  “Born in 1925,” she repeated. “Law degree from Århus in 1950. Junior lawyer with Laursen and Bonde in Vallensbæk, 1950 to 1954. Set up his own firm in Korsør in 1954, right to plead before the High Court in 1965. Married to Sara Julie Enevoldsen, 1950. Divorced, 1973. Two children by first marriage. Married his secretary, Mie Hansen, 1974. One child by her, a daughter by the name of Cecilie, born the same year.”

  She looked up, a suggestive expression on her face. There was the explanation for his late fatherhood. The bloke had knocked up his secretary. Philip Nørvig seemed to be a man who knew what he wanted.

  “He stood for chairman of the local association of sports clubs and was voted in for three terms. After a while he joined the parish council, too. Until 1982, when he got forced out because of accusations of fraud in his law firm. He had to go to court, but got off due to lack of evidence. Still lost a lot of clients, though, and by the time he disappeared five years later, he’d had his driving license revoked because of a drunk driving conviction. Financially, he’d gone down the drain as well. It was all in the red.”

  “Hmmm.” Carl thrust out his lower lip and felt the urge for a smoke. A ciggie would do the world of good for his ailing health and his powers of concentration.

  “Hey, don’t you be lighting up now, Carl,” Rose said.

  Carl stared at her in astonishment. How the . . . ?

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, Rose.” He cleared his throat. It had started to itch. “You got any tea in that urn of yours, Assad?”

  His assistant’s brown eyes lit up for a moment, only to be extinguished again. “I’m afraid not, Carl. But I can offer you a good cup of coffee. What do you say?”

  Carl swallowed. Assad’s coffee was enough to put the wind up any virus.

  “As long as it’s not too strong, Assad,” he replied with an imploring look. Last time it had cost him half a toilet roll. He didn’t want that again.

  “So the only thing connecting the two cases is that both individuals disappeared under pretty much the same circumstances,” he reasoned. “Both were going to Copenhagen that day. We don’t know why Rita Nielsen was, but Nørvig said he had a meeting. It’s not much to go on, Rose.”

  “You’re forgetting the time, Carl. They disappeared on the same day and almost at the exact same time. That’s what I call weird.”

  “I’m still not convinced. What abo
ut the other two cases on the list?”

  She looked down at the sheet of paper in her hands. “There’s a Viggo Mogensen who we don’t know anything about. He just vanished. Last seen down by the harbor in Lundeborg, setting out over the Storebælt in his little boat.”

  “Was he a fisherman?”

  “Don’t think so. It was just a little boat he had. He did have a fishing boat at one point, but it was broken up. Probably on account of all that EU fishing quota crap.”

  “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 Nielse
n 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.