The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Curt stood still for a moment. “What does Mie know?”

  “Nothing much. Not from me, at any rate, and probably not from Philip either. She seems to have picked up a few snippets here and there, that’s all. She mentioned Louis Petterson as well. She kept on, though I tried to stop her. I’m afraid she’s become rather headstrong of late.”

  This was not good. “What did she say, exactly; can you remember?” Curt shivered with cold, goose bumps appearing on his skin, his few remaining body hairs standing on end.

  He listened without comment to what Herbert Sønderskov had to tell him. Only when he was finished did he speak.

  “Do you know if this detective has been in touch with Louis Petterson?”

  “No, I was going to check, but I haven’t got Louis’s mobile number. Not exactly available on the Internet, is it?”

  There was a silence as Curt tried to assess the damage. No, it was not good. Not good at all.

  “Herbert, our work has never been so much in jeopardy, so please try to understand what I’m now going to ask of you. You and Mie are to go on holiday, are you with me? I’ll pay. Go to Tenerife. On the west of the island there are some cliffs called Acantilado de Los Gigantes. They’re very steep and they face the sea.”

  “Oh, God,” said Sønderskov faintly.

  “Listen to me, Herbert! There is no other way. It must look like an accident, do you hear me?”

  He heard the sound of Sønderskov’s labored breathing at the other end.

  “Herbert, much is at stake. Consider your brother, good friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Not to mention yourself. It could mean years of effort wasted and political ruin. Many will be brought down if Mie isn’t stopped. We’re talking court cases, long and protracted. Lengthy jail sentences. Disgrace and downfall. All the work we’ve done to establish ourselves as an organization will be in vain. Thousands upon thousands of hours and donations to the tune of millions. Today was the Purity Party’s First National Congress. After the next election we’ll be represented in parliament. You and Mie will be jeopardizing all of this if you fail to act.”

  Still Sønderskov was unable to speak.

  “I take it you destroyed Philip’s files as we agreed. Are all his records gone?”

  There was no answer. Curt was mortified. Now they’d have to take care of it themselves.

  “I can’t do it, Curt. Can’t we just go away until it all dies down?” Sønderskov begged. As if he didn’t know his pleas were hopeless.

  “Two distinguished pensioners with Danish passports, Herbert? Do you seriously believe you could just blend into the crowd? The police would find you in no time. And if they didn’t, we would.”

  “Oh, God,” Sønderskov said again.

  “You’ve got twenty-four hours. Book with Star Tour tomorrow. If they’re sold out, take a scheduled flight to Madrid, then on to Tenerife by domestic airline. Once you’re there, take photos of your location every five hours and e-mail them to me so I know where you are. This will be the end of the matter, are you with me?”

  The reply came hesitantly. “I understand.”

  And then Curt hung up.

  We’ll check that you do, he said to himself. And then we’ll get those bloody files out of the house and burn them.

  He scrolled through his missed calls on the iPhone’s display. Sønderskov had been telling the truth. He’d been calling him every half hour since twelve thirty. And later Louis Petterson had been doing likewise, fifteen calls in all.

  This did not bode well at all.

  An investigation into Philip Nørvig’s disappearance didn’t worry him in the slightest. He’d had nothing to do with it. The thing that concerned him was what Mie had told the police.

  Hadn’t he warned Philip about that damned woman? Hadn’t he warned Herbert?

  He had, had he not?

  • • •

  Half an hour of crisis passed, during which time he called Louis Petterson’s mobile repeatedly before the young journalist called back.

  “Yeah, sorry, it’s just that I turn my mobile off every time I’ve called you, so I can’t be traced,” he explained. “I don’t want that Carl Mørck bloke and his creepy assistant calling me up either.”

  “Give me a quick briefing,” Curt demanded. Petterson complied.

  “Where are you now?” Curt asked, when he was done.

  “A lay-by outside Kiel.”

  “And where are you going?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  Curt nodded.

  “And you needn’t worry. The Benefice files are all with me.”

  Good man.

  They concluded the conversation and Curt got dressed. Sleep would have to wait.

  He went upstairs to the hobby room with its little kitchenette, pulled out a drawer under the worktable, removed a plastic tray full of nuts and bolts, and retrieved the old Nokia phone that lay hidden underneath.

  He inserted a pay-as-you-go SIM card, plugged the phone into the charger, activated it, and dialed Caspersen’s number. His call was answered in less than twenty seconds.

  “You’re up late, Curt. How come you’re calling from this number?”

  “A crisis,” he replied. “Note down the number and call me up from your pay-as-you-go. In exactly five minutes.”

  Caspersen did as he was instructed, listening to Curt’s briefing in deep silence.

  “Who have we got at Police HQ that can be trusted?” Curt asked, when he had finished explaining.

  “No one. But we’ve a man at Station City,” Caspersen replied.

  “Get in touch with him, tell him there’s a police investigation we need to have stopped. Tell him it’ll be worth his while, as long as this Carl Mørck is pacified.”

  24

  November 2010

  Carl glanced at the time as he turned into the parking lot with his wipers going full whack. A quarter to four, three-quarters of an hour late for his stupid appointment with Kris, the shrink. Mona would give him hell for this tonight. Why the fuck did everything have to go belly-up all the time?

  “Better take this with us,” said Assad, digging a folding umbrella out of the storage pocket in the car door.

  Carl killed the engine. “I’m not in the fucking mood for sharing umbrellas,” he grumbled, then found himself regretting his words as he stood at the entrance to the grim concrete building and realized someone had pulled the plug out of the sky and all he could see was a curtain of rain.

  “Get in under this, Carl. You’ve just been ill, remember?” Assad shouted.

  He stared disapprovingly at the polka-dot umbrella. What the hell could possess a full-grown man in the prime of life to purchase such a monstrously ridiculous item? It was pink, for Chrissake.

  He huddled underneath it nonetheless, scuttling through the puddles with Assad until a colleague suddenly appeared from out of the deluge and walked past them with a grin on his face as if he’d suspected all along the two of them had something going on between them besides police work. Fucking embarrassing, it was.

  Carl stepped out into the pouring rain with his chin up. Men with umbrellas were pathetic, almost as bad as men who stripped to the waist on picnics. He couldn’t be doing with them.

  “You look like a drowned rat,” the duty officer said as Carl squelched by in a hurry, sounding like a sink plunger gone berserk.

  • • •

  “Check who’s behind this Benefice organization, will you, Rose?” he said, ignoring her comments about beached whales and upturned bathtubs.

  He dabbed at his clothes with toilet paper in a feeble attempt to dry off, promising himself to get an automatic hand dryer installed in the lavs. One of those things would have his body temperature back to normal in no time.

  “Have you spoken to Lis, Assad?” he asked, three-quarters of a ro
ll later, as Assad unfurled his prayer mat on the floor of his cubbyhole.

  “All in good time, Carl. Prayers first.”

  Carl glanced at his watch. Half of HQ would be heading home in a minute, Lis among them. Somebody had to stick to normal working hours, even if it wasn’t him.

  He plonked himself down on his office chair and called her number.

  “Department A. How can I help you-u-u?” sang a voice he could have sworn belonged to Ms. Sørensen.

  “Er, Lis?”

  “Lis is at the gynecologist’s. This is Cata speaking.”

  Too much information, on both counts.

  “Oh, I see. Carl Mørck here. Did either of you check up on who this Louis Petterson character called at about three this afternoon?”

  “Yes, love, we did.”

  “Love?” Was he hearing right? What kind of a course had she been on anyway? Arse-lickers’ proficiency?

  “He called that Curt Wad in Brøndby. Do you want his address?”

  • • •

  Two calls to Louis Petterson yielded nothing but a message telling him the number was unavailable at the moment, but then what had he expected? He would have rather enjoyed confronting Petterson with why he’d called someone he claimed he had nothing to do with.

  He looked up at his bulletin board with a sigh, picking out the scrap of paper with Kris’s number on it. It wasn’t one he’d considered writing in his little phone book, but using it now was certainly a more attractive option than wading through the weather to Anker Heegaards Gade.

  “Kris la Cour,” said the voice at the other end. So he had a pretentious surname to boot.

  “Carl Mørck,” he replied.

  “I can’t speak to you now, Carl, I’m just about to receive a client. Call me back tomorrow morning.”

  Bollocks. Mona would definitely not be pleased.

  “I do apologize, Kris,” he blurted out, before the guy hung up. “It turned out there was just no way I could make it today. As you know, my path is woeful and paved with corpses. Can’t you fit me in on Monday instead? Please? I know it’ll be good for me.”

  The pause that followed was as excruciating as the one between the executioner’s “Aim” and “Fire!” There was no doubt in his mind that this self-important fountain of eau de cologne would be reporting directly back to Mona.

  “Hmm. Are you sincere about that, I wonder?”

  Sincere about what, Carl was just about to ask, only then to grasp what he was getting at.

  “I most certainly am. I’m convinced our sessions will prove highly beneficial to me,” he replied, thinking more in terms of access to Mona’s gorgeously accommodating body than any attempts Kris might make at straightening out his cerebral convolutions.

  “All right, Monday it is, then. Three o’clock, same as today. OK?”

  Carl turned his eyes to the ceiling. Yeah, for fuck’s sake.

  “Thanks,” he said, and hung up.

  “Two things for you, Carl,” said a voice behind him.

  He could smell the perfume before she even spoke. Like a shimmering shroud of fabric softener suspended in the air. Impossible to ignore.

  He turned and saw Rose in the doorway with a pile of newspapers under her arm.

  “What’s that perfume you’re wearing?” he asked, knowing full well that what she said next could be tantamount to lethal stab wounds if he didn’t watch out.

  “That? Oh, it’s Yrsa’s.”

  Enough said. It seemed they wouldn’t be allowed to forget Yrsa in a hurry.

  “First off is I’ve checked this Herbert Sønderskov who you had a chat with down in Halsskov. Seems he’s on the level when he says he can’t have had anything to do with Nørvig’s disappearance, because he was in Greenland from the first of April to the eighteenth of October 1987. He was under contract as a jurist with the home government there.”

  Carl nodded, feeling the disturbing rumblings of a tempest brewing in his colon.

  “And second, this Benefice thing is a privately funded think tank. Besides a couple of political analysts working freelance, they’ve got one journalist on the permanent staff, this Louis Petterson. They work according to what they call ‘the briefcase technique,’ which means they produce short copy that busy politicians can scan in a few seconds. Populist, tendentious crap, if you ask me.”

  Carl didn’t doubt it for a second. “Who’s behind it?” he asked.

  “A Liselotte Siemens. She’s chair of the board and her sister’s the managing director.”

  “Hmm. Never heard of her.”

  “Me neither, but I checked up on her background. I went back twenty-five years through all her various registered addresses, before I turned up something that might be a lead.”

  “Go on.”

  “In the late eighties she was living at the same address as a well-known fertility doctor out in Hellerup by the name of Wilfrid Lønberg. He’s the father of the two Siemens sisters. Which is pretty interesting, I’d say.”

  “Yeah?” Carl leaned forward slightly. “Why’s that, then?”

  “Because Wilfrid Lønberg is one of the founders of the Purity Party. Haven’t you seen him on telly?”

  Carl tried to think back, only to find that his turbulent guts seemed to have severed all connection to his cerebral cortex.

  “OK. And what are the newspapers for, then?” he went on, indicating the pile under Rose’s arm.

  “Assad and I are sifting through the period our missing persons disappeared again, just different newspapers this time. We need to be certain we’ve covered everything.”

  “Nice work, Rose,” he said, calculating how many strides it would take him to get to the bathroom.

  Ten minutes later he stood in front of Assad looking decidedly pale. “I’m off home, Assad. Dodgy stomach.”

  Now he’s going to say “Told you so,” Carl thought to himself.

  But instead Assad reached underneath the desk, producing his umbrella and then handing it to him.

  “Pity the camel that cannot cough and shit at the same time,” he said.

  Whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.

  • • •

  The drive home was a tap dance on the accelerator, sweat dripping from every pore, his stomach in utter turmoil. If he got stopped by the traffic police he’d have no option but to plead force majeure. He even considered turning on the blue light and the siren. It’d been decades since he last shit his pants, and he was banking on keeping up the good run for some while to come.

  So when he got home and found the front door locked he almost tore it down. What the hell were they playing at in there?

  Five minutes of relief on the crapper and he was feeling rather better. In two hours he was due to present himself and his Colgate smile at Mona’s, ready to play favorite uncle for her beast of a grandson.

  Hardy was awake when he came into the living room, watching the rain spill over the roof gutters.

  “Fucking weather,” he said, hearing Carl enter. “What I wouldn’t give to be out in it just for half a minute.”

  “Nice to see you, too, mate.” Carl sat down by Hardy’s bed and ran his hand over his friend’s forehead. “There’s a downside to everything, you know. I’ve just got myself a dose of bloody stomach flu because of that weather.”

  “Straight up? I’d give anything for stomach flu.”

  Carl smiled and followed Hardy’s eyes downward.

  There was a letter open on his duvet, and Carl recognized the address of the sender immediately. He was expecting one himself any day now.

  “Ah, so your divorce from Minna came through. How do you feel about it, Hardy?”

  Hardy clenched his teeth and made a heart-rending attempt to avoid noticing Carl’s sympathetic expression.

  “Don’t think I can talk abou
t it, Carl,” he replied, after a minute or so in the deepest silence.

  Carl understood him better than anyone. It had been a good marriage. Probably the best in Carl’s circle of acquaintances. It’d have been their silver wedding in a few months, but the bullet Hardy caught had scuppered that, too.

  Carl nodded. “Did Minna come round with it herself?”

  “Yeah. Our boy was with her. They’re all right.”

  Hardy understood, of course he did. Why should the life of the woman he loved stop just because his had?

  “The funny thing is I gained a little bit of hope today.”

  Carl raised his eyebrows, a reflex. He smiled apologetically, but too late.

  “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, Carl. You think I’m a plonker who refuses to face facts. But half an hour ago Mika did something to me that hurt like fuck. Enough to have Morten dancing a jig round the room, anyway.”

  “Who the hell’s Mika?”

  “OK, you sure haven’t been home much lately. If you don’t know who Mika is, you better ask Morten. Only remember to knock first. They’re in the intimate phase at the moment.” He emitted a gurgling sound that could pass for a chuckle.

  • • •

  Carl stood quiet as a mouse outside Morten’s basement door until muffled laughter provided him with a cue to knock.

  He went in hesitantly. The thought of seeing blubbery Morten in a close encounter with someone called Mika was enough to give anyone pause.

  The two men were standing innocently in front of the open door of what had once been a sauna, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders.

  “Hey, Carl. Just showing Mika my Playmobil collection.”

  Carl sensed the lame expression on his face. If Morten Holland really had got this swarthy hunk down here on the pretext of inspecting his Playmobil collection, it beat hands down all his own ruses for luring unsuspecting women into his lair.

  “Hullo,” said Mika, extending a hand hairier than Carl’s chest. “Mika Johansen. I’m a collector, like Morten.”