“You can give the train a miss today, Yrsa,” he said. “I want to put you both in the picture on the way, if you don’t mind.”
Reluctantly, she climbed into the backseat, almost like a queen who’d been fobbed off with a taxi. Legs crossed and her bag on her lap. Soon, the cloud of her perfume settled beneath the nicotine-stained roof lining.
“Pasgård’s had word back from the Section for Aquatic Biology. They’ve given us quite a bit to go on. First thing is they’ve now established that the scale comes from a species of trout most often found in fjords, where fresh-water and seawater converge.”
“What about the slime?” Yrsa asked.
“Most likely from common mussels or fjord shrimps. That’ll have to stay unresolved for the time being.”
Assad nodded in the passenger seat next to him and flicked to the first page of Krak’s map of Nordsjælland. After a moment, he placed his finger near the middle of the page. “OK, I see them here now. Roskilde Fjord and the Isefjord. Aha! I had no idea they joined together at Hundested.”
“Oh, my God, don’t tell me you’re going to have to trawl around them both? What a job you’ll have!”
“Right on both counts, Yrsa.” Carl glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Fortunately, we’ve got the help of a sailor with local knowledge. Lives in Stenløse, like you. You probably remember him from that double murder in Rørvig, Assad. Thomasen. The bloke who knew the father of the two who got murdered.”
“Yes, indeed. His first name started with a ‘K’, and he had a fat belly.”
“Exactly. His name’s Klaes. Klaes Thomasen from the police station at Nykøbing. He’s got a boat moored at Frederikssund and knows the fjords like the back of his hand. He’s going to take us out. I reckon we’ve got a couple of hours before it gets dark.”
“You mean we are going to sail on the water?” Assad asked in a quiet voice.
“We’re going to have to if we want to find a boathouse projecting into the fjord.”
“I am not so happy about this, Carl.”
Carl chose to ignore him. “Besides being the stamping ground of the fjord trout, there’s another indication that we ought to be looking for the boathouse in the vicinity of the mouths of the fjords. I’m loath to admit it, but Pasgård has done a very good job. After letting the marine biologists take their samples, he sent the paper on which the message was written to Forensics so that they could have a look at the shadowy areas Laursen picked out. It turns out to be printer’s ink. Or at least the remnants of such.”
“I thought they’d done all that in Scotland,” said Yrsa.
“Their efforts were focused on the written characters rather than the paper itself. But when Forensics ran their tests this morning, it turned out there were remains of printer’s ink all over it.”
“Was it just ink, or did it say anything?” she asked.
Carl smiled to himself. Once, when he was a boy, he and one of the other lads had lain flat out on their stomachs at the fairground in Brønderslev staring at a footprint. Slightly obliterated by rain but still clearly distinct from the rest. They could make out the imprint of letters that seemed to have been scratched into the sole, but only after some time had elapsed did they realize that they were back to front. PEDRO, they read. And before long, they had put together a story that the shoe probably belonged to some machinist from Pedershaab Maskinfabrik who was afraid someone would nick his only pair of safety shoes. So after that, whenever the two lads stuffed away their own shoes in the lockers of the open-air baths at the other end of town, they always had this poor Pedro in mind.
It had been the beginning of Carl’s interest in detective work, and now here he was, somehow back at the start again.
“Turns out the writing was back to front. There must have been a newspaper pressed against the paper for some time, and the lettering rubbed off.”
“Get out!” Yrsa leaned as far forward as her crossed legs would allow. “What did it say, then?”
“Well, if the lettering hadn’t been the size it was, we’d most likely never have known, but as far as I understand it they’ve figured out it says Frederikssund Avis. One of those free local papers that comes out once a week.”
At this point, he had imagined Assad whooping with delight, but there was no reaction.
“Don’t you see? This means we can narrow down the geography considerably, as long as we assume that the piece of paper the message was written on came from within the newspaper’s circulation area. Otherwise, we’d have been looking at Nordsjælland’s entire coastline. Have you any idea how many kilometers that would be?”
“No,” came the curt reply from the backseat.
He hadn’t, either, for that matter.
And then his mobile chimed. He glanced at the display and immediately felt a warm glow inside.
“Mona,” he said in a completely different tone than before. “How nice of you to call.”
He sensed Assad shift uneasily in his seat. Maybe he was no longer quite so confident that his boss was an also-ran in matters romantic.
Carl angled the conversation toward inviting her over that same evening, but that wasn’t why she was calling. It was purely professional this time, she said with a laugh that made Carl’s pulse race. Right now she had a colleague with her, and he would rather like to speak to Carl about his traumas.
Carl frowned. He would, would he? What did his traumas have to do with her male colleagues? His traumas were for her, and her alone. In fact, he’d been saving them up.
“I’m doing fine, Mona, so that won’t be necessary,” he said, picturing the gleam in her eyes.
She laughed again. “I’m sure you’re fine after last night, Carl. It sounds like it, anyway. But before that you weren’t doing too well, remember? And I can’t always be there for you around the clock.”
He swallowed, almost trembling at the thought. He was just about to ask her why not, but decided it would keep until later.
“OK, you win.” He very nearly added “darling” but caught sight of Yrsa’s gleefully attentive eyes in the rearview mirror and thought better of it.
“Tell your colleague he can come and see me tomorrow. We’ve got a lot on the go, though, so I can’t give him much time, OK?”
He had forgotten to invite her over. Shit!
It would have to wait until tomorrow. Hopefully, she would still be interested.
He snapped his mobile shut and forced a smile in the direction of Assad. He had felt like Don Juan when he’d looked at himself in the mirror that morning. The feeling seemed to have gone now.
“Hey-aay, Mona! Tell you, Mona, what I’m gonna do. Get-a my house a-next door to you. Ooh, ooh, Mona!” Yrsa broke into song on the backseat.
Assad gave a start. If he thought he had heard her sing before, he certainly had now. Her voice was in a league of its own.
“I don’t think I am familiar with this song,” Assad said. He turned his head toward the backseat and nodded appreciatively. And then fell silent again.
Carl shook his head. Damn! Now Yrsa knew about Mona, which meant that soon everyone else would know, too. Maybe he shouldn’t have answered the call.
“Just think,” said Yrsa.
Carl glanced at her in the mirror. “Think what?” he replied, ready to launch a counterstrike.
“Frederikssund. Just think, he might have murdered Poul Holt here, near Frederikssund.” Yrsa stared out ahead.
So the Carl and Mona thing had already been dismissed from her thoughts. And yes, he knew what she meant. Frederikssund wasn’t far from where she was living now.
Depravity didn’t discriminate between one town and another.
“So now you’ll try to find a boathouse at the top of one of the fjords,” she went on. “That’s a scary thought, if it’s right. But how come you’re so sure it won’t be further south? Don’t people there read the local rag as well?”
“True. The paper could have been taken away from the Frederikssund area f
or whatever reason. But we have to start somewhere, and this seems to be the best bet, logically speaking. Am I right, Assad?”
His assistant in the passenger seat said nothing. Most likely he was already feeling seasick.
“This’ll be fine,” said Yrsa and pointed out at the pavement. “Just drop me off here.”
Carl glanced at the GPS. A little farther along Byvej and then Ejnar Thygesens Vej, and they would be at Sandalparken, where she lived. Why did she want out here?
“We’ll run you to the door, Yrsa. It’s no bother.”
He sensed she had excuses piled up at the ready. Something like she needed to get the shopping in. But if she did, she would have to do it later.
“I’ll pop in with you for a second, Yrsa, if that’s OK. I just want to say hello to Rose and have a quick word.”
He noted the look of consternation that spread across her powdered face. “Won’t take a second,” he said again, relieving her of the initiative.
He pulled up outside number nineteen and jumped out of the car. “You stay here, Assad,” he instructed, opening the back door for Yrsa.
“I don’t think Rose is home,” she said as they entered the stairwell. Her expression was one he hadn’t seen before. More subdued than otherwise and rather resigned. It was the kind of look someone would have when leaving an exam room knowing that their performance had been mediocre at best.
“Just wait here for a moment, would you, Carl?” she said, putting the key in the door of her flat. “She may still be in bed, you see. She’s been sleeping a lot of late.”
Carl glanced at the name on the door as Yrsa called out for Rose inside. All it read was Knudsen.
Yrsa called again, then returned.
“She doesn’t seem to be in, I’m afraid. Perhaps she’s out shopping. Do you want me to give her a message?”
Carl wedged his foot inside the door. “Tell you what, I’ll write her a note. Have you got a piece of paper?”
Years of practice and his inborn ingenuity got him farther into her domain. Like a snail propelling itself almost imperceptibly forward. You couldn’t see his feet move, but after a while some distance had been covered, and all of a sudden he was impossible to get rid of.
“The place is a tip,” Yrsa apologized, still with her coat on. “Rose can’t keep things tidy when she’s like this. Especially when she’s on her own in the daytime.”
She was right. The hall was a confusion of jackets and coats, empty boxes, and stacks of gossip magazines.
Carl glanced inside the living room. Rose’s place was a far cry from how Carl imagined an emo girl with a punk hairdo and liquid spleen coursing through her veins would be living. It looked like it had been decorated by some vintage hippie who had just stepped down from a Nepalese mountaintop with a rucksack full of oriental knickknacks. Carl hadn’t seen the like since the time he’d got lucky with a girl from Vrå. Here were incense-burners, great trays of brass and copper with elephants and all sorts of mystical little effigies on them. Tie-dyed tapestries hung from the walls and ox hides were draped over the chairs. If there had only been a defaced American flag as well, they could have been back in the midseventies. And all of it presented beneath a thick layer of dust. Apart from the gossip mags and other glossies, the room contained absolutely nothing to suggest even remotely that the two sisters, Yrsa and Rose, could be the architects of such an anachronistic mess.
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” he replied, his gaze passing over unwashed plates and empty pizza boxes. “How big is the flat?”
“Eighty-three square meters. Besides the living room we’ve got a bedroom each. But you’re right, this isn’t that bad at all. You should see our rooms.”
She laughed, but underneath she would clearly rather plant an ax between his shoulder blades than allow him to move more than ten centimeters closer to the doors of their private bolt-holes. That was what she had just told him, in her own roundabout way. He wasn’t that out of touch with women.
Carl scanned the room for something that stuck out. If you wanted to know people’s secrets, it was always the things that stuck out that gave them away.
He found it almost immediately. A bare polystyrene head, the sort used to put wigs and hats on, and beside it a bowl full of pill bottles. He moved forward to get a closer look at the labels, only for Yrsa to step in front of him and hand him the piece of paper he had asked for.
“You can sit here to write,” she said, motioning toward a dining chair with no laundry on it. “I’ll pass it on to Rose as soon as she gets back.”
“We haven’t got much more than an hour and a half, Carl. Don’t leave it so late another time, OK?”
Carl nodded his appreciation to Klaes Thomasen before turning to look at Assad, who sat in the boat’s cockpit like a cornered mouse. In his bright-orange life jacket he looked completely forlorn, like a nervous child facing his first day at school. He had no confidence whatsoever that the overweight, elderly man at the rudder, who sat filling his pipe with tobacco, would be able to save him from the certain death he was about to meet in the five-centimeter-high waves.
Carl studied the chart beneath its covering of plastic.
“An hour and a half,” said Klaes Thomasen. “And what is it exactly we’re looking for?”
“We need to find a boathouse. One that juts out into the water but most probably rather secluded, away from any accessible road or path. We might not even be able to see it from the fjord at all. To begin with, I reckon we should sail from Crown Prince Frederik’s Bridge and on up to Kulhuse. Do you think we’ll get any farther than that?”
The retired policeman thrust out his lower lip and inserted his pipe. “She’s no racer, just a leisurely old vessel,” he muttered. “Seven knots is all she’ll do. That should suit our hand down below. What do you reckon, Assad? Everything all right there?”
Assad’s complexion, usually so dark, looked now like it had been peroxided. He was not having fun.
“Seven knots, you say. What’s that, about thirteen kilometers per hour?” Carl asked. “We won’t even make it to Kulhuse and back before it gets dark. I’d been hoping maybe we’d get over to the other side of Hornsherred. Over to Orø, then back again.”
Thomasen shook his head. “I can get the wife to pick us up at Dalby Huse on the other side, but we won’t get farther than that. Even then it’ll be getting fairly dark the last part of the way.”
“What about the boat?”
He shrugged. “If we don’t find what we’re looking for today, I can go back out on my own tomorrow and have a scout around. You know what they say: old coppers never rust in a headwind.”
Obviously an idiom of the homemade variety.
“One more thing, Klaes. The two brothers who were held in this boathouse could hear a rumbling sound. Like a wind turbine, something like that. Anything ring a bell?”
He removed his pipe and peered at Carl with the eyes of a bloodhound. “There’s been all sorts of fuss around here about what they call infrasound. They’ve been on about it for years, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it went back to the nineties, too.”
“What’s infrasound when it’s at home?”
“Sort of a hum in the background. Very resonant, infuriating noise. For a long time, they thought it came from the steelworks at Frederiksværk, but it seems that theory was disproved when the place shut down for a period and the noise still went on.”
“The steelworks. Isn’t that out of the way, on a peninsula?”
“You could say. But infrasound can be registered at quite some distance from the source. Some reckon you can hear it up to twenty kilometers away. There’s been complaints from Frederiksværk and Frederikssund, even from Jægerspris on the other side of the fjord.”
Carl gazed out over the water, its surface broken by raindrops. It all looked peaceful enough. Houses and cottages nestling among woodland, lush meadows, and fields. Sailing boats on gentle waters, gulls in flocks. And in this sodden idyll, the underton
e of some inexplicable hum. Behind these pleasant facades people were going mad.
“As long as the source and the extent of the noise remain unknown, it’s no use to us,” Carl said. “I’d thought we might check the distribution of wind turbines in the area, but it’s questionable whether they could be the source at all. It seems they were at a standstill all over the country during the days we’re interested in. I think we’ve got a job on our hands here.”
“Can we not go home, then?” came a quiet voice from below.
Carl glanced through the hatch at Assad. Was this really the man who had been in a fistfight with Samir Ghazi? The man who could break down a door with one kick and who once had saved Carl’s life? If it was, then he had plainly gone downhill during the last five minutes.
“Are you going to throw up, Assad?” Thomasen inquired.
Assad shook his head. Which only went to show how little the man knew of the joys of seasickness.
“Here,” said Carl, thrusting a spare pair of binoculars into Assad’s hand. “Just breathe easily and go with the movement of the boat. Try to keep your eye on the coastline there.”
“I cannot leave the bench, Carl,” Assad replied.
“That’s OK. You can see perfectly well through the window.”
“You probably needn’t bother with this stretch here,” Thomasen said, steering directly toward the middle of the fjord. “It’s mostly just sandy beach and fields going down to the water’s edge. Our best bet’s probably to go up toward Nordskoven. That’s all woods down to the fjord, but then quite a few folk live there, so it’s doubtful a boathouse could be kept hidden.”
He gestured toward the road that ran north–south along the eastern side of the fjord. Flat agricultural land, dotted with tiny villages. Poul Holt’s killer certainly couldn’t have holed up on that side of the fjord.
Carl looked at his map. “If the theory about fjord trout is right, and if Roskilde Fjord here isn’t the place to look, then that means we need to be over on the other side of Hornsherred, on the Isefjord. The question is, where? Judging by the map, there don’t seem to be that many possibilities. It’s mostly agricultural land, fields down to the water’s edge. Where could anyone have a hidden boathouse there? And if we carry on to the Holbæk side or farther north toward Odsherred, we’ll be too far, because that would take a lot longer than an hour from the site of the kidnapping in Ballerup.” He suddenly became doubtful. “Or would it?”
A Conspiracy of Faith Page 28