The Keeper of Lost Causes

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  The doctor breathed in big gulps of air when Carl let go of his collar. “I drive a Mercedes,” he said, “and I’m not married.” Mørck could see it in the white-coat man’s eyes. He thought he’d figured out the state Carl was in. Presumably something he’d learned in a psychology course that he’d squeezed in between anatomy lectures. “A smattering of humor usually defuses the situation” was what he’d apparently been taught, but it didn’t work on Carl.

  “Why don’t you toddle off to the minister of health and learn what real arrogance is like, you little shit,” Carl said as he shoved the doctor aside. “You’re just a novice.”

  They were waiting for him in his office, both Marcus Jacobsen, the chief of homicide, and that idiot Lars Bjørn. An unsettling sign that the doctor’s cries for help had already been heard outside the thick walls of the clinic. Carl studied the two men for a moment. No, it looked instead as if some lunatic impulse had invaded their bureaucratic brains. He caught them exchanging glances. Or did the situation smell more of some sort of crisis intervention? Was he once again going to be forced to talk with a psychologist about how to understand and combat post-traumatic stress? Could he expect yet another man with deep-set eyes to appear and try to force his way into Carl’s dark nooks and crannies, so he could unveil what had been told and what had not? They might as well stop wasting their time, because Carl knew better. It was impossible to talk his way out of this problem. It had been coming on for a long time, but the incident out on Amager had pushed him over the edge.

  They could all kiss his ass.

  “Well, Carl,” said Jacobsen, motioning with his head toward his empty chair. “Lars and I have been discussing your situation, and in many respects we think we’ve arrived at a parting of ways.”

  Now it sounded like he was going to be fired. Carl began drumming his fingernails on the edge of the desk as he stared over his boss’s head. They wanted to fire him? Well, he wasn’t going to make it easy for them.

  Carl looked beyond Tivoli Gardens, up at the clouds that were gathering and threatening the city. If they fired him, he would leave before the rain started pissing down. He wouldn’t bother chasing after the union rep. He would go straight over to the union office on H. C. Andersen Boulevard. Fire a good colleague a mere week after he returned from sick leave and only a few weeks after he was shot and lost two good teammates? They couldn’t do that to him. The world’s oldest police union was just going to have to show that it was worthy in its old age.

  “I realize that this is a bit sudden for you, Carl. But we’ve decided to give you a slight change of air, and in a manner that will allow us to make better use of your excellent abilities as a detective. To put it simply, we’re going to promote you to department head of a new division, Department Q. Its goal will be to investigate cases that have been shelved, but are of particular interest to the public welfare. Cases deserving special scrutiny, you might say.”

  I’ll be damned, thought Carl, tilting his chair back.

  “You’re going to have to run the department alone, but who would be better at it than you?”

  “Just about anybody,” he replied, staring at the wall.

  “Now listen here, Carl. You’ve been through a tough time, and this job is custom-made for you,” the deputy said.

  What the hell do you know about it, you bugger? thought Carl.

  “You’ll be running the show entirely on your own. We’ll select a number of cases in consultation with various district police commissioners, and then you can prioritize how to handle them and what procedures to use. You’ll have an expense account for travel; we just need a monthly report,” added his boss.

  Carl frowned. “District police commissioners? Is that what you said?”

  “Yes, this is a nationwide jurisdiction. Which is why you can no longer be on the same team with your former colleagues. We’ve set up a new department here at headquarters, but it will be a separate entity. Your office is being furnished at this very moment.”

  Clever move. Now they won’t have to listen to my bitching anymore, thought Carl. But what he said was: “Is that right? And where is this office located, if I may ask? Are you thinking of giving me yours?”

  Now his boss’s smile looked a bit embarrassed. “Where your office is located? Well, for the time being it’s in the basement, but we may be able to change that later on. Let’s see how things go first. If the percentage of cases you solve is even halfway decent, who knows what might happen.”

  Carl once again turned his gaze to the clouds. In the basement, they said. So that was the plan. They were going to wear him down. They would toss him a few bones, freeze him out, isolate him, and make sure he was depressed. As if it made any difference whether that was done up here or down below. He was still going to do exactly what he wanted to. Which was, as much as possible, absolutely nothing.

  “How is Hardy doing, by the way?” Jacobsen asked after a suitable pause.

  Carl shifted his gaze back to his boss. It was the first time he’d ever asked that question.

  5

  2002

  In the evening Merete Lynggaard was her real self. With every white line that whipped beneath her car on the way home, she discarded a part of herself that didn’t fit in with life behind the yew trees in Magleby. She felt transformed the instant she turned toward the sleepy expanses of Stevns and crossed the bridge over the Tryggevælde River.

  Uffe was sitting there as usual, a cup of cold tea on the edge of the coffee table in front of him, bathed in the light from the TV, with the volume turned up full blast. After she parked the car in the garage and walked around to the back door, she could clearly see him through the windows facing the courtyard. Always the same Uffe. Silent and motionless.

  She kicked off her high heels in the utility room, dumped her briefcase on top of the furnace, hung up her coat in the entrance hall, and left all her papers in her office. Then she took off her Filippa K. trouser suit, placed it on the chair next to the washing machine, took down her dressing gown from its hook, and put on her slippers. Everything was exactly as it should be. She wasn’t the type who needed to wash off the day under the shower as soon as she stepped in the door.

  Then she rummaged in the plastic bag and found the Hopjes sweets at the bottom. Only when the candy lay on her tongue and raised her blood sugar was she ready to turn her attention to the living room.

  It wasn’t until then that she shouted: “Hi, Uffe! I’m home now.” Always the same ritual. She knew that Uffe had seen the headlights of her car the second she drove up the hill, but neither of them had a need for contact until the time was right.

  She sat down in front of him, trying to catch his eye. “Hey there, mister, are you sitting here watching TV and mooning over that cute newscaster Trine Sick?”

  He scrunched up his face so his crow’s feet reached his hairline, but his eyes never left the screen.

  “You’re a real rascal, you know that?” Then she took his hand. It was warm and soft, as always. “But you like Lotte Mejlhede better. Do you think I haven’t noticed?”

  Now she saw his lips slowly widen into a grin. Contact was established. Oh yes, Uffe was still inside there. And Uffe knew full well what he wanted in life.

  She turned to look at the TV screen and listened to the last two reports on the evening news. The first had to do with the Nutrition Council’s appeal to institute a ban on industrially manufactured trans-fatty acids; the second was about the hopeless marketing campaign conducted by the Danish Poultry Association with government financing. She was only too familiar with the issues. They had resulted in two long nights of intense work.

  She turned to Uffe and ruffled his hair so that the big scar on his scalp became visible. “Come on, lazybones, let’s see about getting ourselves some dinner.” With her free hand she grabbed one of the sofa cushions and slapped it against the back of his neck until he started shrieking with joy and flailing his arms and legs. Then she let go of his hair, leaped like a
mountain goat over the sofa, through the living room and out to the stairwell. It never failed. Hooting and chuckling with glee and stifled energy, Uffe followed close on her heels. Like a couple of train carriages connected by spring steel, they raced upstairs, down again, outside to the front of the garage, back to the living room, and finally out to the kitchen. Soon they would sit down in front of the TV to eat the food that the home help had cooked for them. Yesterday they had watched Mr. Bean. The day before it was Chaplin. Today it would be Mr. Bean again. The video collection that Merete and Uffe owned included only what Uffe enjoyed watching. He usually lasted half an hour before he fell asleep. Then she would spread a blanket over him and let him sleep on the sofa. Later in the night he would find his own way upstairs to the bedroom. There he would take her hand and grunt a bit before falling asleep beside her in the double bed. When he was finally sound asleep, making soft whistling noises, she would turn on the light and start getting ready for the next day.

  That was how the evenings and nights unfolded. Because that was how Uffe loved things to be—her sweet, innocent little brother. Sweet, silent Uffe.

  6

  2007

  It was true that a brass plate on the door was engraved with the words “Department Q,” but the door itself had been lifted off its hinges and was now leaning against a bunch of hot-water pipes that stretched all the way down the long basement corridor. Ten buckets, half filled and giving off paint fumes, still stood inside the room that was supposed to be his office. From the ceiling hung four fluorescent lights, the type that after a while would provoke a splitting headache. But the walls were fine—except for the color. It was hard not to make a comparison with hospitals in Eastern Europe.

  “Viva, Marcus Jacobsen,” grumbled Carl, trying to get a grip on the situation.

  For the last hundred yards along the basement corridor he hadn’t seen a soul. In his end of the basement there were no people, there was no daylight, air, or anything else that might distinguish the place from the Gulag Archipelago. Nothing was more natural than to compare his domain with the fourth circle of hell.

  He looked down at his two spanking-new computers and the bundle of wires attached to them. Apparently the information superhighway had been split up so that the intranet was linked to one computer and the rest of the world to the other. He patted computer number two. Here he could sit for hours and surf the Net to his heart’s content. No pesky rules about secure surfing and safeguarding the central servers; at least that was something. He looked around for an ashtray and tapped a cigarette out of the pack. “Smoking is extremely hazardous to you and those around you,” it said on the label. He glanced around. The few termites that might thrive down here could probably handle it. He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. There was definitely a certain advantage to being head of his own department.

  “We’ll send the cases down to you,” Marcus Jacobsen had said, but there wasn’t so much as a single sheet of A5 paper on the desk, and all the shelves were empty. They must have thought he needed time to settle into the place. But Carl didn’t mind; he wasn’t about to work on anything until the spirit happened to move him.

  He shoved the chair sideways over to the desk, sat down, and propped his feet up on the corner. That was how he’d sat for most of the time he’d been off on sick leave. During the first few weeks at home he’d simply stared into space, smoking cigarettes and trying not to think about the weight of Hardy’s heavy, paralyzed body or the rattling sound that Anker had made before he died. After that he’d surfed the Internet. Aimlessly, without any sort of plan, just trying to numb his mind. That was exactly what he intended to do now. He looked at his watch. He had just about five hours to kill before he could go home.

  Carl lived in Allerød, which had been his wife’s choice. They’d moved there a couple of years before she walked out on him and moved into a cottage in an allotment garden in Islev. She’d looked at a map of Zealand and quickly worked out that if you wanted to have it all, you needed plenty of dough in the bank—or else you could move to Allerød. Nice little town on the S-train line, surrounded by fields, with forested land “within walking distance,” as they say. It had lots of pleasant shops, a cinema, theater, social groups, and, to top it all, the house was located in the Rønneholt Park development. His wife had been ecstatic. For a reasonable price they could buy a semidetached house made from stacked-up breeze blocks with plenty of room for both of them, as well as her son. They would even have access to tennis courts, an indoor swimming pool, and a community center, all in the proximity of fields of grain, a marsh, and a hell of a lot of good neighbors. Because she’d read that in Rønneholt Park everyone cared about each other. Back then that hadn’t been a plus as far as Carl was concerned, because who the hell believed that sort of crap anyway? But later on it had turned out to be important. Without his friends in Rønneholt Park, Carl would have fallen flat on his ass. Both metaphorically and literally. First his wife took off. Then she decided she didn’t want a divorce, but instead took up residence in the allotment garden. Next she went through a whole series of young lovers, and she had the bad habit of ringing Carl to tell him all about them. Then her son refused to keep living with her in the garden cottage, and in the full throes of puberty had moved back in with Carl. And finally there was the shooting out in Amager, which brought to a screeching halt everything that Carl had been clinging to: a solid purpose in life and a couple of good colleagues who didn’t give a damn whether he’d gotten out of bed on the wrong side or not. No, if it hadn’t been for Rønneholt Park and the people who lived there, he would have really been up shit creek.

  When Carl got home, he leaned his bicycle against the shed outside the kitchen, noting that the other two occupants of the house were both there. As usual, his lodger, Morten Holland, had turned the volume all the way up as he listened to opera in the basement, while his stepson’s downloaded blowtorch heavy metal was blasting out of a window upstairs. A less compatible collage of sounds was not to be found anywhere else on the planet.

  He forced his way inside the inferno and stomped a couple of times on the floor. Down in the basement Rigoletto was instantly wrapped up in cotton wool. It wasn’t that simple with the boy upstairs. Carl took the stairs in three bounds and didn’t bother to knock on the door.

  “Jesper, for God’s sake! The sound waves have shattered two windows down on Pinjevangen. And you’re the one who’s going to pay for them!” he shouted as loud as he could.

  The boy had heard the same story before, so he didn’t move a muscle as he hunched over the computer keyboard.

  “Hey!” yelled Carl, right in his ear. “Turn it down or I’ll cut the ADSL cable.”

  That got a reaction.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Morten had already set plates on the table. Someone in the neighborhood had once labeled him the surrogate mother at number 73, but that wasn’t right. Morten was not a surrogate; he was a real housewife and the best that Carl had ever encountered. He took care of the grocery shopping and laundry, the cooking and cleaning, while opera arias trilled from his sensitive lips. And to cap it all, he even paid rent.

  “Did you go to the university today?” asked Carl, knowing what the answer would be. Morten was thirty-three years old, and he’d spent the past thirteen of those years diligently studying all kinds of subjects other than the ones having any direct bearing on the three degree programs in which he was officially enrolled. The result was an overwhelming knowledge about everything except the subjects for which he was receiving financial support and which in the future would presumably earn him a living.

  Morten turned his heavy, corpulent back to Carl and stared down the bubbling mass in the pot on the stove. “I’ve decided to study political science.”

  He’d mentioned that before; it was just a matter of time before he tried that subject too. “Jesus, Morten, don’t you think you should finish your economics degree first?” Carl couldn’t help asking.

  Morten tossed some
salt into the pot and began stirring. “Almost everybody in economics votes for the government parties, and that’s just not me.”

  “How the hell do you know that? You never even go to class, Morten.”

  “I was there yesterday. I told my fellow students a joke about Karina Jensen.”

  “A joke about a politician who started out as an extreme left-winger and ended up joining the Liberal Party? Shouldn’t be hard to make a joke about that.”

  “‘She’s an example of how to hide a Neanderthal behind a high-brow,’ I said. And nobody laughed.”

  Morten was different. An overgrown adolescent and androgynous virgin whose personal relationships consisted of remarks exchanged with random supermarket customers about what they were buying. A little chat by the freezer section about whether spinach was best with or without cream sauce.

  “What does it matter if nobody laughed, Morten? There could be lots of reasons for that. I didn’t laugh either, and I don’t vote for the government parties, in case you’d like to know.” Carl shook his head. He knew it was no use. But as long as Morten kept on making a good salary at the video store, it really didn’t matter what the hell he studied or didn’t study. “Political science, eh? Sounds deadly boring.”