A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Studsgaard was about to protest, but Carl raised a hand and stopped him. “Where is this asbestos, exactly?”

  The man frowned. “This isn’t about where or how. We have an incidence of asbestos contamination. Asbestos is a carcinogen. It’s not something you wipe up with a floor cloth.”

  “Were you here when the inspection took place, Rose?” Carl inquired.

  She pointed off down the corridor. “They found some dust along there somewhere.”

  “ASSAD!” Carl yelled, so loud the man took a step backward. “Come on, Rose, show me,” he said as Assad popped into view.

  “You too, Assad. Bring your bucket, a cloth, and those nice green gloves of yours. Job for you.”

  They walked the fifteen steps along the corridor and then Rose pointed to some white, powdery substance on the floor between her black boots. “There!” she exclaimed.

  The man from Health and Safety protested and endeavored to explain that what they were clearly intending to do was quite inadequate. That the source would be left untouched, and that common sense and all the regulations dictated that contamination should be removed in accordance with existing precepts.

  Carl ignored him. “Once you’ve wiped it up, Assad, I want you to get on the phone and call a joiner. We need a partition wall to separate Health and Safety’s contaminated zone from our briefing space. Don’t want to be breathing all that crap into our lungs, do we, now?”

  Assad shook his head deliberately. “What space was that you said, Carl? Briefing space…?”

  “Just wipe the floor, Assad. The man’s busy.”

  The official flashed Carl a hostile look. “You’ll be hearing from us,” was the last thing he said as he huffed off down the corridor, briefcase clutched tight against his rib cage.

  Hearing from them! Carl didn’t doubt it for a minute.

  “Tell me now, Assad, what all my case files are doing up there on the wall,” said Carl. “I hope for your sake they’re copies.”

  “Copies? If you prefer copies, Carl, I can take them down again. I can get you all the copies you want, no problem.”

  Carl swallowed. “Are you telling me to my face that these are the original documents you’ve hung up to dry?”

  “Look at my system, Carl. Tell me, by all means, if you do not find it so fantastic. That would be all right. I won’t get mad.”

  Carl recoiled. “Mad?” he repeated. He’d been away a fortnight and his staff had gone off their heads from inhaling asbestos.

  “Take a look, Carl.” With an expression of glee, Assad held out two balls of string.

  “Well done, Assad. You’ve pilfered some string. Blue string and red string. Excellent. In nine months you can gift wrap your Christmas presents.”

  Assad slapped him on the back. “Ha, ha, Carl. Very good. Now you are your old self again.”

  Carl shook his head. It irked him to think that his retirement depended on him reaching an age that was still so far off.

  “But look.” Assad drew off a length of blue string, then tore off a piece of adhesive tape, affixing one end of the string to a case dating back to the sixties. Then he pulled the string across a number of other cases, snipped it with a pair of scissors, and attached the other end to a case from the eighties. “Clever, don’t you think?”

  Carl put his hands behind his neck as if to keep his head in place. “A magnificent work of art, Assad. Andy Warhol would be proud.”

  “Andy who?”

  “What is it exactly you’re doing, Assad? Are you trying to suggest a connection between those two cases?”

  “Just imagine if they actually were connected, then we would be able to see it.” He indicated his blue string. “Right here! Blue string!” He snapped his fingers. “It means we think the cases might have something in common.”

  Carl inhaled deeply. “Aha! Let me guess what the red string’s for.”

  “Yes, exactly! That is for when we know the cases really are connected. A good system, don’t you think?”

  Carl took in more air. “Yes, Assad. The only thing wrong with it is that none of the cases have anything at all in common. As such, it would be so much better for them to be in a pile on my desk so that we might peruse them at our leisure. Would that be OK with you?” It wasn’t a question, but an answer came anyway.

  “Well, all right, boss.” Assad rocked back and forth in his worn-out Ecco shoes. “I will begin to photocopy in ten minutes. Originals for you, copies on the wall for me.”

  Marcus Jacobsen was looking older all of a sudden. A lot of work had passed over his desk of late. Not least the ongoing gang war and its attendant shootings in the Nørrebro district, but also a series of dreadful fires, all of them arson and resulting in enormous financial losses, as well as having cost human lives. Always at night. If Marcus had slept three hours a day this past week, he’d been doing well. Maybe it was worth being accommodating, whatever Marcus had on his mind.

  “What’s up, Chief? Dragging me all this way upstairs again?” Carl said.

  Marcus fingered his empty cigarette packet. Poor sod, thought Carl, he’ll never get past withdrawal. “Yes, I know there’s not much room for you up here, Carl. But strictly speaking, I’m not allowed to have you in the basement. And now Health and Safety are on the phone telling me you’re obstructing one of their officers.”

  “It’s all sorted, Marcus. We’re having a partition wall put up slap in the middle of the corridor with a door in it and everything. It’ll all be shut off.”

  The bags under Marcus’s eyes seemed to grow heavier. “That’s exactly the kind of thing I don’t want to hear, Carl,” he said. “Which is why you and Rose and Assad are going to have to camp out up here. I can’t be taking flak from Health and Safety. There’s enough bother as it is. You know how much I’ve got on my plate at the moment. See for yourself.” He indicated the neat new flatscreen on the wall. TV2 News was running a feature on the impact of the gang war. Calls for a funeral procession through the streets of Copenhagen to honor one of the victims merely inflamed matters further. People were braying about how come the police didn’t just take the troublemakers by the scruff of the neck so the streets could be safe again.

  Marcus Jacobsen was indeed a worried man.

  “OK, if you move us up here, you can shut down Department Q right now, this very second.”

  “Don’t tempt me, Carl.”

  “Meaning you lose eight million a year in funding. Wasn’t that what we were allotted, eight million? Hell of a price for petrol for that old wreck we drive around in. Oh, yeah, and three salaries, of course, for me and Rose and Assad. Eight million. Not exactly plausible, is it?”

  The homicide chief gave a sigh. Carl had him by the short and curlies. Without that funding, his own department would be short of at least five million a year. Creative redistribution. A bit like a government support scheme for outlying regions. Robbery made legal.

  “Solutions, please,” he said eventually.

  “Where were you thinking of putting us up here, anyway?” Carl asked. “In the bathroom? In the window alcove where Assad was yesterday? Or maybe here, in your office?”

  “There’s room in the corridor.” Marcus Jacobsen winced noticeably as he spoke. “We’ll find somewhere better soon. That’s been the idea all along, Carl.”

  “OK, fine by me. We’ll be needing three new desks, then.” Carl stood and extended his hand as though it was a done deal.

  The homicide chief backtracked slightly. “Just a minute,” he said. “I sense something fishy going on here.”

  “Fishy? You get three extra desks, and when Health and Safety come back, I’ll send Rose upstairs to pretty up the empty chairs.”

  “They’ll never buy it, Carl.” He paused a moment and looked like he might be taking the bait. “Then again…Sit down a minute, will you, Carl? There’s something I want you to have a look at. Remember three or four years ago we assisted our colleagues in Scotland?”

  Carl nodded hesitantly.
Was Marcus now about to impose bagpipes and haggis on Department Q? It was bad enough with Norwegians once in a while, but Scots!

  “We sent them some DNA from a Scot doing time in Vestre, I’m sure you remember. It was Bak’s case. They solved a murder on that count, and now they’ve sent us something in return. A police expert in Edinburgh, Douglas Gilliam, has sent us this parcel. There’s a letter inside. A message in a bottle, apparently. They’ve had a linguist take a look at it and discovered it must be from Denmark.” He picked up a brown cardboard box. “They want to know the upshot, if we ever get a handle on it. It’s all yours, Carl.”

  He handed him the box and gestured dismissively, plainly finished with him.

  “What do you expect me to do with it?” Carl inquired. “How about passing it on to the post office instead?”

  Jacobsen smiled. “Very funny, Carl. Sadly, Post Danmark aren’t exactly specialists in solving mysteries, more in creating them, I’d say.”

  “We’re busy enough as it is,” Carl countered.

  “I don’t doubt it, Carl. But see what you can do. It’s probably nothing. Besides, it meets all the criteria for Department Q. It’s old, it’s unsolved, and no one else could be arsed.”

  Something else to stop me putting my feet up, Carl mused to himself, weighing the box in his hand as he descended the stairs.

  But then again.

  An hour’s shut-eye was hardly going to be detrimental to Danish–Scottish relations.

  “I’ll be finished with it all by tomorrow. Rose is helping me,” said Assad as he considered where the case he now stood with in his hand might originally have fitted into Carl’s three-pile filing system.

  Carl growled. The Scottish box was on the desk in front of him. Premonitions tended to stick, and he had a bad feeling about the cardboard box with the broken customs authority seal on it.

  “This is a new case, perhaps?” Assad inquired with interest, his gaze fixed on the brown cube. “Who has opened the box?”

  Carl jerked his thumb upward in the direction of the third floor.

  “Rose, come here a minute, will you?” Carl yelled into the corridor.

  Five minutes passed before she appeared: enough time in her view to signal just who was in charge. You got used to it.

  “What would you say to being assigned your first proper case, Rose?” He nudged the cardboard box gently across the desk toward her.

  He was unable to see her eyes beneath the jet-black fringe of her punk hairdo, but he felt sure they were hardly sparkling with enthusiasm.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “It’s to do with child porn or trafficking, am I right? Something you couldn’t be arsed with. In that case, the answer’s no. If you don’t fancy it yourself, you can give it to our little camel driver to amuse himself with. I’ve got other things to be doing.”

  Carl smiled. She hadn’t really sworn, and she hadn’t kicked the door frame. And describing Assad as a camel driver was almost a compliment, coming from her. Anyone would think she was in a good mood. He nudged at the box again. “It’s a letter. A message in a bottle. I haven’t seen it yet. We could unpack it together.”

  She wrinkled her nose. Distrust was her partner in life.

  Carl pulled the flaps of the box apart, removed handfuls of polystyrene packing, and retrieved a folder that he placed on the desk. Then he rummaged around in more polystyrene and found a plastic bag.

  “What’s that inside?” Rose asked.

  “Shards from the bottle, I suppose.”

  “You mean they broke it?”

  “No, they took it apart. There’s a set of instructions in the folder telling you how to put it together again. Should be a piece of cake for a handywoman like you.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him and weighed the bag in her hand. “It’s not very heavy. How big was it?”

  He shoved the case file toward her. “Read it yourself.”

  She left the box where it was and went off down the corridor. Peace at last. In an hour it would be time to go home. He would take the train back to Allerød, buy a bottle of whisky, anesthetize himself and Hardy with a glass each, one with a straw and one with ice. A quiet night in.

  He closed his eyes and dozed for all of ten seconds until Assad suddenly made his presence felt in front of him.

  “I have found something, Carl. Come and have a look on the wall.”

  Funny how being off in the land of nod for only a few seconds always impacted so forcefully on one’s sense of balance, Carl thought to himself, clutching dizzily at the corridor wall as Assad proudly indicated one of the case documents that was affixed to the notice board.

  Carl dragged himself back to the real world. “Say that again, Assad. My thoughts were somewhere else.”

  “I asked only if you thought the chief might not consider this case in light of all the fires in Copenhagen.”

  Carl tested the floor beneath his feet to make sure it was steady, then went up to the wall upon which Assad’s index finger was now planted. The case was fourteen years old. A fire in which a body had been found. Murder, perhaps, in the area close to the city lake called Damhussøen. A case concerning the discovery of a body so badly burned that neither time of death nor gender could be established. All genetic material had perished. No missing person matched the body. Eventually, the case had been shelved. Carl remembered it well. It had been one of Antonsen’s.

  “What makes you think it has anything to do with the arsons going on now, Assad?”

  “Arsons?”

  “The fire-raising.”

  “Because!” said Assad, pointing eagerly at a photograph detailing skeletal remains. “This round groove in the bone of his short finger. It says something about it here, too.” He removed the plastic folder from the notice board and found the page from the report. “Here it is described. ‘As though made by a signet ring over a period of many years,’ it says here. A groove going all the way around.”

  “So what?”

  “On the short finger, Carl.”

  “And?”

  “I remember from Department A, there was a body in the first fire that was missing its short finger altogether.”

  “OK. The correct term is little finger, Assad. Not short.”

  “Exactly. And in the next fire was a groove in the short finger of the man who was found. Just like here.”

  Carl’s eyebrows lifted demonstrably.

  “I think you should go up to the third floor and tell the chief what you’ve just told me, Assad.”

  Assad beamed. “I would never have seen it if it wasn’t for that photo being stuck to the wall in front of my nose all this time. Funny, don’t you think?”

  It was as though with her new assignment a chink had appeared in Rose’s impenetrable armor. At any rate, she did not begin by waving the document in his face and shouting but instead removed his ashtray and placed the letter carefully, almost respectfully, on his desk.

  “It’s very hard to read,” she said. “It seems it was written in blood, which gradually absorbed dampness from the condensation and drew it into the paper. Besides, the capitals are poorly done. The heading’s quite clear, though. See how legible it is. It says ‘HELP.’”

  Carl leaned grudgingly forward and studied what remained of the capital letters. The paper may once have been white, but now it was brown. Its edges were in tatters in several places, with bits missing, presumably lost when the paper was unfolded after being in the water.

  “What tests have been done on it, does it say? Where was it found? And when?”

  “It was found off the Orkney Islands. Caught up in a fishing net. In 2002, apparently.”

  “In 2002! They weren’t in a hurry to pass it on, then.”

  “The bottle had been left on a windowsill and forgotten. That’s most likely the cause of the condensation. It’ll have been in the sun.”

  “They’re all pissheads in Scotland,” muttered Carl.

  “There’s a pretty useless DNA profile her
e. And some ultraviolet photos. They’ve done their best to preserve the letter. And look, here’s their reconstruction of the wording. Some of it can actually be read.”

  Carl looked at the photocopy and immediately regretted his hasty caricature of the Scottish population. Comparing the original letter with the attempt at reconstruction, the results were impressive indeed.

  He skimmed through the reconstructed wording. People have always been fascinated by the idea of sending a message in a bottle that might end up on the other side of the world, perhaps leading to new and unexpected adventures.

  But that wasn’t the case here. This was deadly serious. Nothing to do with boyish pranks, or a project by Cub Scouts on some exciting field trip. No blue skies and harmony here. The letter was almost certainly what it seemed to be.

  A desperate cry for help.

  5

  The moment he left her, he left behind his day-to-day life. He drove the twenty kilometers or so from Roskilde to the secluded farm-laborer’s cottage that lay almost midway between their home and the house by the fjord. Reversed the van out of the barn and then parked the Mercedes inside. Locked the barn door, took a quick shower, and dyed his hair, changed his clothes and stood in front of the mirror for ten minutes getting ready. He found what he needed in the cupboards, then went outside with his bags to the light-blue Peugeot Partner he used on his trips. An undistinguished vehicle, neither too big nor too small, its mud-spattered number plates not noticeably obliterated at first sight and yet still almost illegible. It was anonymous, and registered in the name he’d used when purchasing the cottage. It suited his purpose.

  By the time he reached this stage, he was always thoroughly prepared. Research on the Internet, and in the registers to which he had collected access codes over the years, had yielded the information he required on potential victims. He was flush with cash, using large-denomination notes to pay at petrol stations and toll bridges, always looking away from the cameras, always keeping his distance if anything untoward seemed to be in the air.