The Keeper of Lost Causes

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “Didn’t I tell you not to come barging in here, Carl?” He slammed his notepad on the desk and glared at him.

  “You fucked up, Børge,” said Carl.

  Whether it was the use of his first name or the accusation, Bak’s reaction was instantaneous. All the furrows on his forehead went vertical, reaching right up to his comb-over.

  “Merete Lynggaard got a bouquet of flowers a few days before her death. And from what I’ve heard, she never used to receive flowers.”

  “So what?” Bak’s expression couldn’t have been more condescending.

  “We’re looking for someone who might have committed a murder. Has that slipped your mind? A lover could be a likely candidate.”

  “We looked into all that.”

  “But it wasn’t included in your report.”

  Bak shrugged. “Take it easy, Carl. You, of all people, should talk about other people’s work. The rest of us are working our asses off while you’re just sitting on your backside. Don’t you think I know that? I put what’s important into the report, and that’s that,” he said, smacking his pad on the desktop.

  “You neglected to include the fact that a social worker named Karin Mortensen observed Uffe Lynggaard playing a game that indicated he remembered the car accident. Maybe he also remembers something from the day when Merete disappeared. But apparently you didn’t pursue that angle very far.”

  “Karen Mortensen. Karen spelled with an e, not an i, Carl. Try listening to yourself. And don’t come here trying to teach me anything about being thorough.”

  “Does that mean you realize how significant this piece of information from Karen Mortensen could be?”

  “Shut the fuck up. We checked it out, okay? Uffe didn’t remember shit about anything. That kid’s got nothing upstairs.”

  “Merete Lynggaard met a man a few days before she died. He was part of a delegation on research into the workings of the immune system. You didn’t put anything about that in your report either.”

  “No, but we looked into it.”

  “So then you must know that a man got in touch with her, and there was clearly strong chemistry between them. That’s what her secretary, Søs Norup, says she told you, at any rate.”

  “Yes, damn it. Of course I know that.”

  “Then why isn’t it in your report?”

  “I don’t know. Probably because it turned out that the man was dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes, burned to death in a car accident the day after Merete disappeared. His name was Daniel Hale.” He enunciated the name carefully, so that Carl would take note of what a good memory he had.

  “Daniel Hale?” Apparently Søs had forgotten his name over the years.

  “Yes, he was working on the placenta research that the delegation was trying to get funded. He had a laboratory in Slangerup.” Bak presented these facts with supreme self-confidence. He had a good handle on this part of the case.

  “If he didn’t die until the following day, he still could have had something to do with Merete’s disappearance.”

  “I don’t think so. He came home from London on the afternoon she drowned.”

  “Was he in love with her? Søs hinted that might be the case.”

  “If so, I feel sorry for the man. She wasn’t having any of it.”

  “Are you sure, Børge?” His colleague clearly wasn’t comfortable hearing Carl use his first name. So that settled things—he was going to hear it nonstop. “Maybe it was this Daniel Hale she had dinner with at Bankeråt. What do you think, Børge?”

  “Listen, Carl. There’s a woman in the cyclist murder case who’s talked to us, and now we’re hot on the trail. I’m busy as fuck right now. Can’t this wait until some other time? Daniel Hale is dead. He wasn’t even in the country when Merete Lynggaard died. She drowned, and Hale didn’t have shit to do with it, OK?”

  “Did you try to find out whether Hale was the person she had dinner with at Bankeråt a week earlier? There’s nothing about it in the report.”

  “Listen to me! The investigation finally pointed to the likelihood that her death was an accident. Besides, there were twenty of us on the case. Go ask somebody else. Now, get out of here, Carl.”

  24

  2007

  If he relied exclusively on his sense of smell and hearing, it was hard to distinguish the basement in police headquarters from Cairo’s teeming alleyways on Monday morning when Carl arrived at work. Never before had that venerable building ever reeked so much of cooking smells and exotic spices, and never before had those walls heard the likes of such twisted tones.

  A secretary from Admin who had just been down to the archives glared at Carl as she passed him, her arms filled with case files. Her expression said that in ten minutes the whole building was going to know that everything had run amok down in the basement.

  The explanation was to be found in Assad’s pygmy office, where a sea of baked goods and pieces of foil holding chopped garlic, little green bits, and yellow rice adorned the plates on his desk. No wonder it was causing raised eyebrows.

  “What’s going on here, Assad?” shouted Carl, turning off the cassette player. Assad merely smiled. Evidently he wasn’t aware of the cultural gap that was presently in the process of gnawing its way deep under the solid foundations of police headquarters.

  Carl dropped heavily onto the chair across from his assistant. “It smells wonderful, Assad, but this is the police department. Not a Lebanese takeaway in Vanløse.”

  “Here, Carl. And congratulations, Mr. Superintendent, one might say,” replied Assad, handing him a buttery dough triangle. “This is from my wife. My daughters cut out the paper.”

  Carl followed Assad’s hand as he gestured around the room. Now he noticed the brilliantly colored tissue paper draped over the bookshelves and ceiling lights.

  This was not going to be easy.

  “I also took some to Hardy yesterday. I have read most of the case files to him out loud now, Carl.”

  “Is that right?” He could just picture the nurses as Assad fed Egyptian rolls to Hardy. “You mean you went to see him on your day off?”

  “He is thinking about the case, Carl. A fine man. He is a fine man.”

  Carl nodded and took a bite. He planned to go and see Hardy tomorrow.

  “I have put together all the papers about the car accident on your desk, Carl. If you like I can also talk a little about what I have been reading.”

  Carl nodded again. Before he knew it, his assistant would be writing the report before they were even done with the case.

  In other parts of Denmark on Christmas Eve in 1986, the temperature was up to six degrees Celsius, but on Sjælland they weren’t as lucky, and it had cost ten people their lives. Five of them died on a narrow country road that ran through a wooded area in the Tibirke Hills; two of them were the parents of Merete and Uffe Lynggaard.

  They had tried to pass a Ford Sierra on a stretch of road where the wind had created a carpet of ice crystals, and that’s where things went terribly wrong. No one was assigned blame, and no lawsuits were filed for damages. It was a simple accident, except that the outcome was anything but simple.

  The car they tried to pass ended up in a tree and was still burning when the fire department arrived, while the car belonging to Merete’s parents lay upside down fifty yards farther away. Merete’s mother was thrown through the windshield and landed in the thickets, her neck broken. Her father was not as lucky. It took him ten minutes to die. Half of the engine block had punctured his abdomen and a tree branch had pierced his ribcage. It was assumed that Uffe remained conscious the whole time, because when the firemen cut him out of the car, he watched their efforts with wide-open, frightened eyes. He refused to let go of his sister’s hand, even when they pulled her out on to the road to give her first aid. He never let go, even for a second.

  The police report was simple and brief, but the newspaper reports were not. It was too good a story.

  In the
other car, a little girl and her father died instantly. The circumstances were especially tragic because only the older boy escaped relatively unharmed. The mother was in the last stages of pregnancy, and the family had been on its way to the hospital. While the firemen tried to put out the blaze under the hood of the car, the mother gave birth to twins with her head resting on the body of her dead husband and one leg pinned beneath the car seat. In spite of heroic efforts to cut all of them out of the car in time, one of the babies died, and the newspapers had a guaranteed front-page story for Christmas Day.

  Assad showed Carl both the local rags and the national papers, and all of them had picked up on the newsworthiness of the story. The photographs were heart-rending. The car in the tree and the torn-up road; the new mother on her way in the ambulance with a sobbing boy at her side; Merete Lynggaard lying on a stretcher in the middle of the road with an oxygen mask over her face; and Uffe, who was sitting on the thin layer of snow with frightened eyes, firmly gripping the hand of his unconscious sister.

  “Here,” said Assad, taking two pages from the Gossip tabloid out of the case file, which he’d taken from Carl’s desk. “Lis found out that some of these pictures were also used in the newspapers when Merete Lynggaard was elected to the Folketing,” Assad added.

  All in all, the photographer who just happened to be in the Tibirke Woods on that particular afternoon had certainly got his money’s worth out of the few hundredths of a second it took to snap those pictures. He was also the one who had photographed the funeral of Merete’s parents—this time in color. Sharp, well-composed press shots of a teenage Merete Lynggaard holding her stunned brother by the hand as the urns were interred in Vestre Cemetery. There were no photographs from the other funeral. It took place in the utmost privacy.

  “What the hell is going on down here?” a voice broke in. “Is it your fault that it stinks like Christmas Eve upstairs in our office?”

  Sigurd Harms, one of the police sergeants from the second floor, was standing in the doorway. He stared with astonishment at the orgy of colors hanging from the lights.

  “Here, Sigurd Fart-Nose,” said Carl, handing him one of the spicy, buttery rolls. “Just wait until Easter. That’s when we burn incense too.”

  A message was delivered from upstairs saying that the homicide chief wanted to see Carl in his office before lunch. Jacobsen wore a gloomy and preoccupied expression as he looked up from reading the documents in front of him and invited Carl to have a seat.

  Carl was about to apologize for Assad and explain that all that deepfrying wouldn’t happen again in the basement; he had the situation under control. But he never got that far before a pair of new detectives came in and sat down against the wall.

  Carl gave them a crooked smile. He didn’t think they were there to arrest him because of a few samosas, or whatever those spicy, doughy things were called.

  When Lars Bjørn and Deputy Police Superintendent Terje Ploug, who’d taken over the nail-gun case, entered the room, the homicide chief flipped the case file closed and turned to Carl. “I want you to know that I’ve called you in because two more murders were discovered this morning. The bodies of two young men were found in a car-repair shop outside Sorø.”

  Sorø, thought Carl. What the devil did that have to do with them?

  “They were both found with ninety-millimeter nails from a Paslode nail gun in their skulls. I’m sure that reminds you of something, right?”

  Carl turned his head to look out of the window, staring at a flock of birds flying over the buildings across the road. He could feel his boss’s eyes fixed on him, but that wasn’t going to do him much good. What had happened in Sorø yesterday didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the case out in Amager. Even on TV shows they used nail guns as weapons these days.

  “Will you take it from here, Terje?” he heard Marcus Jacobsen say, as if from far off.

  “Sure. We’re convinced that it’s the same perpetrators who killed Georg Madsen in the barracks out in Amager.”

  Carl turned to face him. “And why is that?”

  “Because Georg Madsen was the uncle of one of the victims in Sorø.”

  Carl turned back to watch the birds again.

  “We’ve got a description of one of the individuals who apparently was at the scene when the murders were committed. Police Detective Stoltz and his team in Sorø want you to drive down there today to compare your description with theirs.”

  “I didn’t see shit. I was unconscious.”

  Terje Ploug gave Carl a look that he didn’t care for. He of all people must have studied the report in detail, so why was he playing dumb? Hadn’t Carl insisted that he was unconscious from the moment he was shot in the temple until they put the IV drip in his arm in the hospital? Didn’t they believe him? What possible reason could they have for wanting to speak with him?

  “In the report it says that you saw a red-checked shirt before the shots were fired.”

  The shirt. Was that all this was about? “So they want me to identify a shirt?” he replied. “Because if that’s what they need, I think they should just e-mail me a photo of it.”

  “They’ve got their own reasons, Carl,” Marcus interjected. “It’s in everyone’s interest that you drive down to Sorø. Not least your own.”

  “I don’t really feel like it.” He glanced at his watch. “Besides, it’s already getting late.”

  “You don’t really feel like it? Tell me, Carl, when is it that you have an appointment to see the crisis counselor?”

  Carl pursed his lips. Did Marcus really have to announce that to the whole department?

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Then I think you should drive to Sorø today, and you’ll have your reaction to the experience fresh in your mind when you see Mona Ibsen tomorrow.” He flashed Carl a phony smile and picked a file off the top of the tallest stack on his desk. “Oh, and by the way, here are copies of the documents we received from Immigration regarding Hafez el-Assad. You can take them with you.”

  Assad ended up doing the driving. He’d brought along some of the spicy rolls and triangles in a lunch box and shoveled them in his mouth as they shot along the E20. Sitting there behind the wheel, he was a happy and contented man, as evidenced by his smiling face. He moved his head from side to side in time to whatever music was playing on the radio.

  “I got your papers from the Immigration Service, Assad, but I haven’t read them yet,” Carl said. “Why don’t you tell me what they say?”

  For a second his driver gave him an alert look as they roared past a procession of trucks. “My birth date, where I come from, and then what I did there. Is that what you mean, Carl?”

  “Why were you granted permanent residency, Assad? Does it say that too?”

  He nodded. “Carl, I would be killed if I went back. That is how it is. The government in Syria was not really very happy with me, you understand.”

  “Why not?”

  “We did not just think the same. And that is enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “Syria is a big country. People just disappear.”

  “OK, so you’re sure that you’ll be killed if you go back?”

  “That is how it is, Carl.”

  “Were you working for the Americans?”

  Assad turned his head sharply to look at Carl. “Why do you say that?”

  Carl looked away. “No reason, Assad. Just asking.”

  The last time Carl visited the old Sorø police station on Storgade, it was part of District 16, under the Ringsted police force. Now it belonged to southern Jutland and Lolland-Falster’s police district, but the bricks were still red, the mugs behind the counter were the same, and the workload hadn’t got any lighter. What benefits were achieved by moving people from one box into another was a question worthy of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

  Carl was expecting one of the detectives at the station to ask him for yet another description of a checked shirt. But they weren’t
that amateurish. A welcome party, four men strong, was waiting for him in an office the size of Assad’s, looking as if each of them had lost a family member in connection with the violent events of the night before.

  “Jørgensen,” announced one of them, holding out his hand. It was ice cold. A few hours earlier this same Jørgensen had undoubtedly been staring into the eyes of a couple of men who’d had their lives blown away with a pneumatic nail gun. And in that case, he probably hadn’t slept a wink all night.

  “Do you want to see the crime scene?” asked one of the officers.

  “Is that necessary?”

  “It’s not completely identical to the scene in Amager. They were killed in a car-repair shop. One in the garage and one in the office. The nails were fired at close range, since they went all the way in. We had to look closely even to see them.”

  One of the other officers handed a couple of A4-size photos to Carl. They were right. The heads of the nails were just barely visible in the skull. There wasn’t even any significant bleeding.

  “As you can see, they were both working. There was dirt on their hands and they were wearing boiler suits.”

  “Was anything missing?”

  “Zilch!”

  Carl hadn’t heard that expression in a while.

  “What were they working on? Wasn’t it late at night? Were they moonlighting, or what?”

  The detectives exchanged glances. This was clearly a question they were still working on.

  “There were footprints from hundreds of shoes. Looks like they never cleaned the place,” Jørgensen added. This wasn’t going to be an easy case for him. “We want you to have a close look at this, Carl,” he went on as he picked up a corner of a cloth that was covering the table. “And don’t say anything until you’re sure.”

  He took off the cloth to reveal four shirts with big red checks, lying side by side like lumberjacks taking a nap on the forest floor.