The Keeper of Lost Causes

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “What reason did they give for looking around the property?” asked Lasse.

  The pressure in Merete’s ears grew stronger. She was having trouble counterbalancing it. She tried to yawn as she concentrated on listening to what they were saying. She could also feel a pressure inside her hip now. In her hip and her teeth.

  “The Danish detective claimed he had a brother who works for Novo, and he wanted to see the place where a big company like InterLab had started out.”

  “What bullshit.”

  “That’s why I called you.”

  “When exactly were they here?”

  “Not twenty minutes ago.”

  “So we might not even have an hour. We’ll also need to shovel up the body and take it away, but there’s not enough time. And we’d have to clean up and wash down afterward. No, we’ll have to wait until later. Right now the important thing is to make sure they don’t find anything, and then leave us in peace.”

  Merete tried to banish the words “shovel up the body.” Was it really her Lasse was talking about? How could any human being be so loathsome and cynical?

  “I hope they come here and get you before you can escape!” she yelled. “I hope you all rot in prison, like the bastards you are! I hate you. Do you hear me? I hate you all!”

  Slowly she stood up as the shadows merged in the smashed panes.

  Lasse’s voice was ice cold. “So maybe you finally understand what hate is! Maybe now you understand, Merete!” he shouted back.

  “Lasse, don’t you think we should blow up the building now?” the woman broke in.

  Merete listened intently.

  There was a pause. He must be thinking. It was her life that was at stake. He was figuring out how best to get away with killing her. It was no longer about her—she was done for. It was about saving their own skins.

  “No, the way things are, we can’t do it. We’ll have to wait. They mustn’t suspect that anything is wrong. If we blow everything up now, it will ruin our plan. We won’t get the insurance money, Mum. We’ll be forced to disappear. For good.”

  “I’ll never manage that, Lasse,” said the woman.

  Then die with me, you witch, thought Merete.

  Not since the day when she looked into Lasse’s eyes at their rendezvous at Café Bankeråt had she heard him speak so gently. “I know, Mum. I know,” he said. He almost sounded human for a moment, but then came the question that made Merete press even harder on her wounded wrist. “Did you say that she’s blocked the door of the airlock?”

  “Yes. Can’t you hear it? The pressure is being equalized much too slowly.”

  “Then I’m going to set the timer.”

  “The timer, Lasse? But it takes twenty minutes before the nozzles will open. Isn’t there any other solution? She’s stabbed herself, Lasse. Can’t we shut off the ventilation system?”

  The timer? Hadn’t they said that they could release the pressure whenever they liked? That she wouldn’t have time to hurt herself before they opened it up? Was that a lie?

  Hysteria began rising inside her. Watch out, Merete, she told herself. Don’t overreact. Don’t retreat inside yourself.

  “Shut off the ventilation system? What good would that do?” Lasse was clearly annoyed. “The air was changed yesterday. It will take at least eight days for her to use up the oxygen. No, I’m going to set the timer.”

  “Having problems?” Merete shouted. “Doesn’t your shitty system work after all, Lasse?”

  He tried to make it seem like he was laughing at her, but she wasn’t fooled. It was obvious that her scorn made him furious.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, controlling himself. “My father built this system. It was the most sophisticated pressure-testing system in the world. This is where you got the finest and most thoroughly tested containment linings on earth. Most other places pump water into the containment and pressure-test it from the inside, but my father’s company also applied pressure from outside. Everything was done with the utmost precision. The timer controlled the temperature and humidity in the room and set all the parameters, so the pressure couldn’t be equalized too fast. Otherwise the containers would crack during quality control. That’s why it all takes time, Merete! That’s why!”

  They were crazy, all of them. “You really do have problems,” she yelled. “You’re all insane. You’re finished, just like me.”

  “Problems? I’ll give you problems!” he raged. She heard some clattering outside and quick steps in the hall. Then a shadow appeared at the edge of the glass, and two deafening bangs came through the loudspeaker system before she saw one of the windowpanes change color again. Now it was almost totally white and opaque.

  “You’d better pulverize this building completely, Lasse, because I’ve left so many calling cards in here that you won’t be able to remove them all. You won’t get away.” She laughed. “You won’t get away with it. I’ve made that impossible for all of you.”

  The next minute she heard six more bangs. They were evidently from shots fired in pairs. But both windowpanes held.

  A short time later she began feeling pressure in her shoulder. Not too much, but it was still uncomfortable. She also had pressure in her forehead, sinuses, and jaw. Her skin felt tight. If this was the effect of the slight equalization caused by the minuscule crack in the door, then what awaited her when they released all the pressure would be absolutely intolerable.

  “The police are coming!” she yelled. “I can feel it.” She looked down at her bleeding arm. The police wouldn’t arrive in time; she knew that. Soon she’d be forced to lift her thumb away from the wound. In twenty minutes the nozzles would open.

  She felt something warm sliding down her other arm, and saw that the first wound had opened itself menacingly. Lasse’s prophecies were going to come true. When the pressure inside her body increased, the blood would come gushing out.

  She twisted her body slightly so she could press her other trickling wrist against her knee. For a second she laughed. It felt like some sort of child’s game from the distant past.

  “I’m activating the timer now, Merete,” he said. “In twenty minutes the nozzles will open and release the pressure in the room. It will take about another half hour before the room is back down to one atmosphere. It’s true that you have time to kill yourself now, before that happens. I don’t doubt that. But I won’t be able to watch anymore, Merete, understand? I can’t see you because the glass is totally opaque. And if I can’t see you, nobody else can either. We’re going to seal up the pressure chamber, Merete. We have lots of plasterboard out here. So you’re going to die in the meantime, one way or the other.”

  She heard the woman laugh.

  “Come on, brother, help me with this,” she heard Lasse say. His voice sounded different now. In control.

  There was a scraping sound, and slowly the room got darker and darker. Then they turned off the floodlights and more plasterboard was piled against the panes until at last it was pitch dark.

  “Good night, Merete,” he said softly out there. “May you burn in hell for all eternity.” Then he switched off the loudspeaker, and everything went quiet.

  38

  The same day

  The traffic jam on the E20 was much worse than usual. Even though the police siren was about to drive Carl crazy, the people sitting in their cars didn’t seem to hear a thing. They were immersed in their own thoughts, with the radio turned up full blast, wishing they were far away.

  Assad sat in the passenger seat, pounding the dashboard with impatience. They drove along the verge for the last few kilometers before they reached the exit, while the vehicles ahead of them were forced to squeeze close together to let them pass.

  When they finally stopped outside the farm, Assad pointed across the road. “Was that car there before?” he asked.

  Carl caught sight of it only after scanning the landscape from the gravel road into no-man’s-land. The vehicle was hidden behind some shrubbery about a hundred
yards away. What they saw was presumably the hood of a steel-gray four-wheel-drive.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, trying to ignore the ringing of his cell phone in his jacket pocket. He pulled the phone out and looked at the number displayed. It was police headquarters.

  “Yeah. This is Mørck,” he said as he looked at the farm buildings. Everything seemed the same. No sign of panic or flight.

  It was Lis on the line, and she sounded smug. “It’s working again, Carl. All the databases are functioning. It was the interior minister’s wife. She finally coughed up the antidote to all the trouble she’d set in motion. And Mrs. Sørensen has already entered all the possible CR combinations for Lars Henrik Jensen, as Assad asked her to do. I think it was a lot of work, so you owe her a big bouquet. But she found the man. Two of the digits had been changed, just as Assad assumed. He’s registered on Strøhusvej in Greve.” Then she gave him the house number.

  Carl looked at some wrought-iron numbers affixed to one of the buildings. Yes, it was the same number. “Thanks, Lis,” he said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “And give Mrs. Sørensen my thanks too. She did a really great job.”

  “Wait, Carl, there’s more.”

  Carl took a deep breath as he saw Assad’s dark eyes scanning the property in front of them. Carl felt it too. There was something really strange about the way these people had set up home here. It was not normal. Not at all.

  “Lars Henrik Jensen has no criminal record, and he’s a ship’s steward by trade,” he heard Lis continue. “He works for the Merconi shipping company and mostly sails on ships in the Baltic. I just talked to his employer, and Lars Henrik Jensen is responsible for the catering on most of their ships. They said he was a very capable man. And by the way, they all call him Lasse.”

  Carl shifted his eyes away from the property. “Do you have a mobile number for him, Lis?”

  “Only a landline.” She rattled it off, but Carl didn’t write it down. What good would it do them? Should they call to say that they’d be arriving in two minutes?

  “No cell phone number?”

  “At that address the only one listed is for a Hans Jensen.” OK. So that was the name of the thin young man. Carl got the number and thanked Lis again.

  “What did she say?” asked Assad.

  Carl shrugged and took the car’s registration certificate out of the glove compartment. “Nothing we don’t already know, Assad. Shall we get going?”

  The gaunt young man opened the door as soon as they knocked. He didn’t say a word, just let them in, almost as if they’d been expected.

  Apparently it was supposed to look as if he and the woman had been eating a meal in peace and quiet, sitting about thirty feet from the door at a table covered with a floral oilcloth. Their meal was presumably a tin of ravioli. But Carl was sure that if he checked, he’d find the food ice cold. They couldn’t fool him. They should save that game for amateurs.

  “We’ve brought a search warrant,” he said, pulling the car registration out of his pocket and briefly holding it up for them to see. The young man flinched at the sight of it.

  “May we take a look around?” With a wave of his hand Carl sent Assad over to the monitors.

  “That, apparently, was a rhetorical question,” said the woman. She was holding a glass of water in her hand, and she looked worn-out. The obstinate look in her eyes was gone, but she didn’t seem scared. Just resigned.

  “What are you using those monitors for?” he asked after Assad checked out the bathroom. He pointed at the green light visible through the cloth draped over the screens.

  “Oh, that’s something that Hans set up,” said the woman. “We live way out here in the country, and we hear about so many bad things happening these days. We wanted to put up some cameras so we could monitor the area around the house.”

  He watched Assad pull off the cloth and shake his head. “They’re blank, Carl. All three of them.”

  “May I ask you, Hans, why the screens are on if they’re not connected?”

  The man looked at his mother.

  “They’re always on,” she told them. “The power comes from the junction box.”

  “The junction box? I see! And where is that?”

  “I don’t know. Lasse would know.” She gave Carl a triumphant look. She’d led him into a dead end. There he was, peering up at an insurmountable wall. Or so she thought.

  “We heard from the shipping company that Lasse isn’t on board a ship at the moment. So where is he?”

  She smiled easily. “When Lasse isn’t out sailing, he keeps company with the ladies. It’s not something he tells his mother about, nor should he.”

  Her smile got bigger. Those yellow teeth of hers were just itching to make a lunge at him.

  “Come on, Assad,” said Carl. “There’s nothing for us to do in here. Let’s go look at the other buildings.”

  He caught a glimpse of the woman as he headed for the door. She was already reaching for her pack of cigarettes, the smile gone from her face. So they were on the right track.

  “Keep a close eye on everything, Assad. We’ll take that building first,” said Carl, pointing to the one that towered high above all the others. “Stay right here and let me know if anything happens down by the other buildings. OK, Assad?”

  He nodded.

  As Carl turned away, he heard a quiet but all too familiar click behind him. He swung around to find Assad with a shiny, four-inch-long switchblade in his hand. Used correctly, it presented serious problems for an opponent; use it incorrectly, and everybody was in trouble.

  “What the hell are you doing, Assad? How’d that get here?”

  He shrugged. “It’s magic, Carl. I will then make it disappear like magic afterward. I promise.”

  “You’d better do that, damn it.”

  Having his mind blown by Assad was apparently turning into a permanent condition. Possession of an illegal weapon? How the hell had he come up with something so stupid?

  “We’re on duty here, Assad. Do you understand? This is as wrong as it gets. Give me the knife.”

  The expertise with which Assad instantly closed up the switchblade was worrisome.

  Carl weighed the knife in his hand before he stuck it in his jacket pocket, accompanied by Assad’s look of disapproval. Even Carl’s big old Scout knife weighed less than this one.

  The enormous hall was built on a concrete floor foundation that had been cracked from frost and water that had seeped in. The gaping holes where the windows should have been were black and rotting around the edges, and the laminated beams supporting the ceiling had also suffered from the weather. It was a huge space. Aside from some debris and fifteen or twenty buckets like the ones he’d seen scattered about the grounds, the room was completely empty.

  He kicked one of the buckets, which spun around, sending up a putrid stench. By the time it stopped, it had cast off a ring of sludge. Carl leaned down to take a closer look. Were those the remains of toilet paper? He shook his head. The buckets had probably been exposed to all types of weather and then filled up with rain water. Anything would stink and look like this, given enough time.

  He looked at the bottom of the bucket and identified the logo of the Merconi shipping company stamped into the plastic. The buckets were probably used for bringing home leftover food from the ships.

  He grabbed a solid iron bar from the junk pile and went to get Assad. Together they walked over to the farthest of the three adjacent buildings.

  “Stay here,” Carl said as he studied the padlock on the door that supposedly only Lasse had a key to. “Come and get me, Assad, if you see anything strange,” he added, then stuck the iron bar under the padlock. In his old police car he’d had an entire toolbox that could have sprung something like this lock in a flash. Now he had to clench his teeth and try brute force.

  He kept at it for thirty seconds before Assad came over and quietly took the iron bar away from him.

  OK, let the young gun give it a try, thou
ght Carl.

  It took only a second before the broken lock lay in the gravel at Assad’s feet.

  A few moments later, Carl stepped inside the building, feeling both defeated and on high alert.

  The room was similar to the one where Mrs. Jensen lived, but instead of furniture, a row of welding cylinders in various colors stood in the middle of the space, along with maybe a hundred yards of empty steel shelves. In the far corner sheets of stainless-steel had been piled up next to a door. There was not much else. Carl took a closer look at the door. It couldn’t lead out of the building or else he would have noticed.

  He went over and tried to open it. The brass handle was shiny, and the door was locked. He looked at the Ruko lock; it too was shiny from recent use.

  “Assad, come in here,” he shouted. “And bring that iron bar!”

  “I thought you told me to stay outside,” Assad said as he joined Carl.

  Carl pointed to the bar Assad was holding and then to the door. “Show me what you can do.”

  The room they entered was filled with the heavy scent of cologne. A bed, desk, computer, full-size mirror, red Wiltax blanket, an open wardrobe containing suits and two or three blue uniforms, a sink with a glass shelf and plenty of bottles of aftershave. The bed was made, the papers were stacked up neatly. There was nothing to indicate that the person who lived here was unbalanced.

  “Why do you think he locked the door, Carl?” asked Assad as he lifted up the desk blotter to glance underneath. Then he knelt down and looked under the bed.

  Carl inspected the rest of the room. Assad was right. There didn’t seem to be anything to hide, so why lock the door?

  “There is something, Carl. Or there then would not be a lock.”