The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  In front of him was a long hallway with doors leading off. It was dark at the end, but light seeped from the two rooms that were nearest. Judging by the cold flicker, the room on his right was a kitchen illuminated by fluorescent lighting, while the warm glow to his left most likely came from a number of incandescent lightbulbs of the kind the EU had now all but criminalized.

  He took a step into the hallway, putting his bag down on the floor and reaching for a hypodermic in his coat pocket.

  If they were both in there, he would need to go for Carl Mørck first. A quick jab into a vein in the neck and he would be out in a moment. If it came to a struggle, he would have to thrust the needle directly into Mørck’s heart, though this was a solution to which he felt less inclined. The dead were rather unforthcoming, and Curt wanted information. Errant information that could cause irreparable damage to his Purity Party and end up destroying the vital work carried out by The Cause.

  Nete had been plotting some kind of vengeance against him, of that he was in little doubt. It all matched up. Her peculiar invitation all those years ago, and now Carl Mørck. It was imperative now to find out once and for all if there was anything in this apartment that might jeopardize his life’s work. Once he’d got the two of them under control, they would talk. And the information they gave him could then be acted upon by others within the organization.

  He heard a sound in the room to the left. Light, rather shuffling footsteps that certainly did not belong to a man of Mørck’s stature.

  He stepped forward and glanced over the startled woman’s shoulder as he appeared in front of her, quickly surveying the living room and finding it empty.

  “Good evening, Nete,” he said, turning his gaze and looking straight into her face. Her eyes were duller than he recalled, gray and lackluster. So less sprightly she had become, her features not nearly as fine and angular as before, her proportions transitioned by time. It was only to be expected.

  “Sorry to barge in on you like this, but the door was open and I took the liberty. I’m sure you don’t mind. I did knock, of course, but you mustn’t have heard.”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “We’re old friends, you and I, aren’t we, Nete? Curt Wad will always be welcome in your home, isn’t that right?”

  He smiled as she stared at him in bewilderment, then scanned the room more closely. Nothing out of the ordinary here, it seemed, apart from the two cups on the table and Carl Mørck being nowhere in sight. He fixed his eyes on the cups. One was almost full. Black coffee, nearly to the brim. The other was half empty.

  Curt stepped closer to the table, making sure that Nete stayed put. He reached out and put his hand to the first cup. The coffee was lukewarm rather than hot.

  “Where is Carl Mørck?” he asked.

  She seemed frightened. As though Mørck was concealed in some corner, watching them. He looked around the room again.

  “Where is he?” he repeated.

  “He left a short time ago.”

  “No, he didn’t, Nete. We would have seen him leave the building. So I’ll ask you again: Where is he? You would be advised to answer me.”

  “He went down the back stairs. I don’t know why.”

  Curt stood still for a moment. Had Mørck spotted his shadow? Had he been one step ahead of them all along?

  “Show me the back door,” he commanded, indicating for her to lead the way.

  She put her hand to her breast and stepped hesitantly past him into the kitchen.

  “There,” she said, gesturing toward the door in the corner, clearly ill at ease. Curt could understand her feeling out of sorts.

  “So he went this way, did he? Meaning he moved all these bottles aside, the vegetable basket, and the rubbish bag, then put them all back again before he left? I’m sorry, Nete, but I’m afraid I don’t believe you.”

  He placed his hands on her shoulders and twisted her abruptly toward him. Her gaze fell to the floor, and no wonder. The simple little bitch was a born liar. Always had been.

  “Where is Carl Mørck?” he repeated, taking a hypodermic from his pocket, removing the safety cap, and placing the needle to her throat.

  “He went down the back stairs,” she said again, a whisper.

  And then he jabbed the needle into her neck and pressed the plunger halfway down.

  Seconds later she began to sway, then collapsed like a rag doll.

  “So, now I have you, Nete Hermansen. If there’s anything you wish to confide, I assure you it’ll remain between the two of us. Do you understand me?”

  He left her in a heap on the floor and went back into the hallway, where he stood still for a moment, listening for the faintest sound, anything that might give cause for alarm. The sound of breathing, the creak of a floorboard, muffled movements. But there was nothing. He returned to the living room. Once it had been two rooms, now knocked into one. It was easy to see, looking up at the stucco that bordered the ceiling. Formerly there would have been a door over in the corner of the far room leading out to the hallway, but it was gone now.

  All in all it was a home befitting a woman of Nete’s age and standing. Neither too old-fashioned nor too modern. A grandfather clock with a ticking pendulum next to a CD player. Some classical music but also one or two more popular albums that Curt’s own taste would have excluded.

  He stared again at the cups on the table and then sat down. He tried to assess what might have become of Carl Mørck and what they would have to do to find him again, and as he did so he picked up the first cup and drank. The coffee tasted bitter, and he put it down with revulsion.

  He reached into his trouser pocket for his secure mobile. Perhaps he should send a man out to Police HQ to see if Mørck had turned up there by some strange and inexplicable means. He looked at his watch. Or maybe he should get someone out to Mørck’s house in Allerød. It was getting late.

  Curt’s head dropped for a second. He felt drained. Age was catching up to him. And then he noticed a tiny spot in the pattern of red and gold at his feet. It looked fresh. Strange, he thought, and dabbed his index finger to see if it was dry.

  It wasn’t.

  He stared in bemusement at his fingertip, trying to grasp what was going on.

  Why would there be fresh blood on Nete Hermansen’s carpet? What could have happened? Was Mørck still here?

  Abruptly, he stood up, went out to the kitchen, and stared at Nete lying there on the floor. He felt a dryness in his mouth and then sudden nausea. He rubbed his cheeks, drank water directly from the tap, moistening his brow while supporting himself against the counter. It was little wonder that the dreadful hours he had been through this last day and night should now take their toll.

  He collected himself and reached for the next hypodermic with its contents of Propofol, making sure it was ready before putting it back in his pocket. If necessary, he could stab it into an assailant within seconds.

  With caution he went out into the hallway, slowly proceeding along its length and gingerly opening the first door to find only an unmade bed and untidy piles of shoes and underwear.

  He carried on to the second door, here to be confronted with a veritable trove of remains from a previous life: robes, handbags, coats. Everything a lady of society could once have desired, put away on shelves and hangers and hooks.

  Nothing here, he decided, closing the door behind him, then sensing once more the same sickly sweet smell that had been there when he first entered the apartment, only now it was stronger. Much stronger.

  He paused, sniffing the air. His senses led him toward the bookcase at the far end of the hallway. Strangly it was almost empty. A few ancient copies of Reader’s Digest and some old weeklies, otherwise nothing. Hardly the source of such an odor.

  Curt stepped closer and breathed in deeply. It was difficult to pinpoint, a thin veil in the air, like the lingering smell
of fish or curry from yesterday’s dinner.

  It was probably a dead mouse behind the baseboard somewhere. What else could it be?

  As he turned back to further investigate the living room, he stumbled and nearly fell.

  Looking down to find the cause, he discovered a fold in the mat. The angle of it puzzled him. As if a door had been opened and had dragged the floor-covering up with it. And there in the middle was blood. Not old, coagulated blood but dark red and fresh.

  He turned to the bookcase and looked again at the mat.

  Then he took hold of one side of the bookcase and pulled it away from the wall.

  It wasn’t heavy. He found himself staring at the door it had concealed. A paneled door with a bolt.

  His heart began to pound. He felt strangely excited. As though this door represented the sum of all the illicit, clandestine activities that had shaped his entire adult life. His secrets of children never born and lives made to fail. Deeds of which he was proud. Some would be offended by such gratification, but it was what he felt. In front of this hidden door he somehow felt at ease, though his mouth remained dry and his head spun.

  He dismissed it all as fatigue and drew back the bolt. It slid easily, the door releasing from the frame with the sound of suction. A rank smell began to fill his nostrils. His eyes passed along the frame, finding it lined with weather strips of strong rubber. He pushed against the door. It felt heavy, quite unlike the others in the apartment, and did not seem to have remained unused for any great length of time.

  Curt’s senses were suddenly on alert. He pulled out the hypodermic.

  “Mørck?” he ventured quietly, without expecting an answer.

  Then he opened the door wide, and the sight that met him almost caused his legs to buckle.

  Here was the source of the smell, its cause so immediately apparent.

  His eyes swept over the bizarre scene before him. Carl Mørck’s motionless body on the floor, the grotesquely mummified heads with their dusty, brittle hair, retracted lips, and blackened teeth. Shrunken, fusty corpses clad in fine clothes, faces frozen, awaiting the last supper. He had never seen anything like it. Gaping sockets stared emptily upon crystal and silver. Transparent skin encased protruding bones and thick tendons. Crooked fingers with yellow nails on the table’s edge. Hands that would never reach out again.

  He swallowed hard and stepped into the room. The smell was pungent, though in no way foul as rotting flesh, and now he recognized it, recalling how he had once opened a glass cabinet containing stuffed birds. Death and eternity all at once.

  Five mummies and two empty chairs. Curt looked down at the first unoccupied place and saw the name NETE HERMANSEN printed neatly on the place card. It wasn’t hard to imagine who the second place was reserved for. The name on the card was almost certainly his own.

  How fiendish she was.

  He bent down to examine Mørck’s motionless frame. The hair at his temple and the back of his skull was matted with blood that still trickled from the wound. Probably he was still alive. He put two fingers to the policeman’s carotid artery and nodded with satisfaction, partly because Nete had secured his arms and legs so effectively with duct tape, and partly because the pulse was normal. He hadn’t lost that much blood either. It was a nasty blow, certainly, but hardly more than would give a slight concussion.

  Curt looked again at the empty place intended to be his own. How fortunate that he had ignored her invitation all those years ago. He tried to work out exactly how long it had been but found himself floundering in time. It must have been twenty years at least. No wonder the guests looked tired.

  He chuckled at his own black humor as he returned down the hallway and into the kitchen, where he took his unconscious hostess firmly under the armpits.

  “Come on, Nete, up you get. Time for your party at long last.”

  He dragged her back to the sealed-off room and heaved her onto the chair at the head of the table, the place she had reserved for herself.

  Again he felt unwell and stood for a moment breathing deeply before collecting himself and retrieving his shoulder bag by the front door. Then he went back to the room and closed the door behind him. With the physician’s nonchalance he tossed the bag onto the table and produced from it an unused hypodermic and an ampoule of Flumazenil. A modest shot of the antidote and Nete would be returned to the here and now.

  She trembled slightly as he pressed home the plunger, hesitantly opening her eyes as though even now she realized that reality would be overpowering.

  Curt smiled at her and patted her cheek. In a couple of minutes she would be lucid enough to talk.

  “And what are we to do about this Carl Mørck?” he mused out loud, glancing about the room. “Ah,” he noted. “An extra chair.” He nodded politely to the ghastly assembly as he drew the chair from the corner. There were dark stains on the upholstery.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m delighted to announce we’ve a new guest in our midst. Do make him feel welcome, won’t you?” he said theatrically, lifting the chair with a flourish and placing it next to Nete’s at the head of the table.

  Then he bent down and took hold of the rugged investigator who had caused him so much consternation, and manhandled his dead weight into position.

  “Excuse me,” he said, reaching across the table and nodding an apology to the figure of what had once been a man. “Our guest seems to be in need of refreshment.”

  He raised the decanter above Carl’s head, removed the stopper, and doused his bloodied scalp with twenty-year-old water that drew colorful deltas on his pallid face.

  46

  November 2010

  Carl came round within seconds and yet in stages. First the water in his face, then the pain that seared through his skull, the ache in his elbow and lower arm, which he had used to parry the blow. His head lolled forward, eyes still closed. He drifted away, then became conscious again, aware of a more general discomfort of a kind he couldn’t remember ever having felt before. His throat was dry, images flashed in his mind, swirling light and waves of color. He felt dreadful, spinning with nausea, a thousand small voices warning him that if he opened his eyes things would only be worse.

  And then a voice more distinct than the rest.

  “Come on, Mørck, pull yourself together.”

  A voice that did not belong in the place he believed himself to be.

  Slowly he opened his eyes and saw the blur of a figure gradually coming together, until suddenly he found himself staring at a mummified human corpse, its jaw agape in a strangled scream.

  It brought him to alertness with a gasp, his eyes still struggling to focus as they shifted from one shriveled cadaver to the next.

  “Fine company, wouldn’t you say, Inspector?” said the voice above him.

  Carl tried to move his head, testing the muscles of his neck, but the pain stopped him. What the hell was this? Bared teeth and dead flesh everywhere. Where was he?

  “Allow me,” said the voice, and he felt a hand grab him by the hair and force his head back with a vicious jolt. It felt as though all his nerve endings screamed at once.

  The old man into whose face he now peered didn’t seem that much different from the corpses at the table. His skin parched and wizened, the blush of his cheeks gone forever, eyes, once so keen, now wreathed by death. Only a day had passed and yet Curt Wad was changed.

  Questions accumulated in his mind. About what he was doing there, and whether Wad and Nete were acting in collusion after all. But he was unable to muster a word.

  And why should he bother? Curt Wad’s presence was answer enough.

  “Welcome to the party,” the old man said, snapping Carl’s head to the side.

  “As you see, Carl, you’re in the company of our hostess. She’s even still breathing, so I’m sure we’re going to have a wonderful time.”

  Carl
stared into Nete Hermansen’s face. She sat slumped, features limp, jaw hanging open.

  His eyes passed over her figure. She was restrained like himself, torso strapped to the chair with duct tape, legs and feet likewise bound.

  “You’re not sitting comfortably, Nete,” Curt Wad said, producing the roll of tape. A series of short ripping sounds ensued as he fastened her arms to the armrests. “A good thing you kept the best chair for yourself.” He laughed, seating himself on the only one that remained empty.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to bid you all welcome. Dinner is served. Bon appétit!”

  He raised his empty glass and acknowledged the assembled company in turn.

  “Perhaps you’d care to introduce me to your guests, Nete?” he suggested, with a nod in the direction of the rawboned carcass in the dusty, moth-eaten tweed who had been placed at the opposite end of the table.

  “I know Philip there, of course.” He raised his glass. “Skål, my old friend. Never a worry as long as Nørvig is at the head of the conference table, isn’t that what we used to say?”

  He broke into deranged laughter. Carl felt like throwing up.

  Curt Wad turned to face their hostess. “Oh dear, Nete, are we feeling out of sorts? A little more Flumazenil, perhaps? You do seem rather peaky. I’ve certainly seen you in better fettle, I must say.”

  She whispered something in reply that Carl didn’t quite catch. It sounded like, “That’s what you think.”

  Wad didn’t seem to hear it either, but his expression changed.

  “Enough mirth. I see you’ve had plans for us all, Nete, and in view of what you were intending, I’m all the more pleased to be here today on my own terms. What’s going to happen now is that the two of you will inform me briefly of how much information you have passed on to outsiders about my work. On that basis I shall be able to assess the extent of the damage and consider how my people might best restore order and renew faith in our misson.”