Carl shrugged. “Hard to tell, really. They certainly haven’t been willing to risk someone getting a whiff of how much they still loved the boy. Their story was that they kicked him out themselves.”
“A whiff? I am not sure of the meaning of this, Carl.”
“Get a whiff of something. Like a hunting dog getting a whiff of its prey.”
“Prey?”
“Never mind, Assad. These people kept their love for their son secret. No one else was to know. They could never tell who was a friend and who might be an enemy.”
Assad gazed for a moment out toward brown fields that would soon sprout with life. “How many times do you think he has done this, Carl?”
How the fuck was he supposed to answer that? There was no answer.
Assad scratched his dark cheeks. “We have to catch him now, Carl. Yes? We simply must.”
Carl clenched his teeth. Yes, they had to catch him now. The Tølløse couple had given them a new name. Birger Sloth was what he had called himself then. The police artist’s likeness had stood up for the third time. Martin Holt had been right. The eyes of the man they were looking for had been rather farther apart. Everything else—the mustache, the hair, the look in his eyes—were things they had to disregard. What they were looking for was a man whose features were sharp and yet somewhat indistinct at the same time. The only thing they could be a hundred percent certain about was that he had collected a ransom in the same place on two different occasions. A short stretch of railway between Sorø and Slagelse, and they already knew the spot. Martin Holt had described it in detail.
They could be there in twenty minutes, only now it was too dark. Bollocks.
It would be their first priority in the morning.
“What shall we do about our Yrsa and Rose?” Assad asked.
“Nothing. We’ll just try to live with it, that’s all.”
Assad nodded. “Most probably she is a camel with three humps,” he mused.
“A what?”
“This is what we say where I come from. Rather apart. Hard to ride, but funny to look at.”
“A three-humped camel. You might be on to something there, Assad. It sounds a lot better than schizophrenic, anyway.”
“Schizophrenic? Where I come from, this is what we say about the man who praises another while shitting on him with his arse.”
There he went again.
38
It was all so fuzzy and far away. Like the end of a dream that never reached its conclusion. Like a mother’s voice barely recalled. “Isabel. Isabel Jønsson, wake up!” The words echoed, as though her skull were too vast to keep them together.
She tried to move and felt nothing but the heaviness of sleep bearing down on her. The drowsy sense of floating between then and now.
Someone was trying to rouse her, pulling at her shoulder. Gently. Repeatedly.
“Are you there, Isabel?” a voice said. “Just breathe deeply.”
She heard sounds of fingers snapping in front of her face but was unable to make sense of them.
“You’ve been in an accident, Isabel,” someone said.
Somehow she knew that.
Hadn’t it just happened? A tumbling sensation, and then the monster approaching in the dark. Had that just happened?
She felt a jab in her arm. Was it real, or was she dreaming?
There was a sudden feeling of blood rushing inside her head, her mind collecting itself, bringing order to chaos. It was order she didn’t want.
And then it came back to her, albeit hazy. Him. The man.
She gasped and felt once again the prickling sensation in her throat, her need to cough making her feel like she would be suffocated.
“Just relax now, Isabel,” said the voice. Someone squeezed her hand. “We’ve given you something to wake you up a bit, that’s all.” Another squeeze.
Everything inside her said yes, squeeze back, Isabel. Show them you’re alive. Show them you’re still here.
“You’ve been badly injured, Isabel. You’re in the Intensive Care Unit of the Rigshospital in Copenhagen. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She breathed in and mustered all her strength to nod. The slightest of movements. Just so she could feel it herself.
“Well done, Isabel. We saw that.” Another squeeze of the hand.
“We’ve put you in traction, so you won’t be able to move if you try. You’ve got multiple fractures, Isabel, but you’re going to be all right. We’re run off our feet at the moment, but as soon as there’s a gap, there’ll be a nurse along to get you ready so you can be moved over to another department. Do you understand, Isabel?”
She tensed the muscles in her neck again.
“Good. We know it’s hard for you to communicate, but after a while, you’ll be able to speak again. You’ve broken your jaw, so we’ve immobilized it just to be on the safe side.”
Now she felt the clamps at her skull. The heavy bags wedged against her hips, like she was buried in sand. She tried to open her eyes, but they would not obey.
“I can tell from your eyebrows that you’re trying to open your eyes, Isabel, but you’re all bandaged up, I’m afraid. There were glass splinters in your eyeballs, but you’ll see the sun shine again in a couple of weeks, just you wait and see.”
A couple of weeks! Why was that bad? Why the twinges of protest darting through her body at the thought? Was time that precious?
Come on, Isabel, a voice inside her whispered. What is it that mustn’t happen? What has happened already? The man, and what else?
She found herself thinking that reality could be many things. The lover who never came but who lived on in her dreams. The ropes hanging from the ceiling of the old gym at school, never quite scaled. Reality was also the things that were waiting to happen. It was the same pressure against her temples. The sensation was just as tangible.
And she breathed slowly and took stock of all these impressions that together made up her consciousness. First came discomfort, then disquiet, and finally an upheaval, ushering faces and sounds and words into her scrambled chains of thought.
Again, she felt the reflexive gasp that accompanied sudden realization.
The children.
The man, their kidnapper.
And Rachel.
“Hmnnnnn,” she heard herself groan through immobilized teeth.
“Yes, Isabel?”
She felt the hand let go and warm breath pass over her face.
“What is it you’re trying to say?” said the voice, up close now.
“Aaaaeehhh.”
“Does anyone understand what she might be saying?” the voice said, directed elsewhere.
“Aaaarglll.”
“Are you inquiring after your friend, Isabel?”
She managed a short sound.
“Yes, that was what you were asking, wasn’t it? How is the woman you were admitted with?”
She made the same sound.
“She’s alive, Isabel! She’s here next to you,” said a new voice at the foot of the bed. “She’s rather worse off than you, I’m afraid. Much worse. We don’t know whether she’ll pull through yet. But she’s alive and her body seems to be strong, so we’re hoping for the best.”
It could have been an hour or a minute, or even a whole day since they had looked in on her last. Time was elastic. All around her was the hum of quiet machines and the faint beep indicating the beat of her own heart. The sheets underneath her felt clammy, and the room was warm. Perhaps it was something they had injected her with that made her feel things this way. Or maybe it was just her.
Outside in the corridor, trolleys rattled, and there were voices, as if in accompaniment. Was it dinnertime? Was it night? She had no idea.
She groaned, but nothing happened. She focused on the interval between her heartbeats and the throbbing in her middle finger, to which some little gadget was attached. Seconds or milliseconds, she couldn’t tell.
But one thing was clear to her. The hea
rtbeat she heard measured out in electronic beeps beside her bed belonged to someone else. She was sufficiently conscious as to be in no doubt. It didn’t fit her own.
She held her breath for a moment. There was the sound of the monitor. Beep, beep. And then another machine, a faint sucking noise, abruptly terminated and followed by what sounded like the hydraulic air release of a bus door opening.
It was a sound she had heard before, during endless hours at her mother’s bedside, before they finally switched off the respirator and gave her peace.
The patient with whom she shared her room was unable to breathe without help. And that patient was Rachel. Wasn’t that what they had said?
She wanted to turn onto her side. To open her eyes and cut through the darkness. To see the person who was struggling for life next to her.
She wanted to speak her name: Rachel. To tell her they would pull through, though she didn’t really believe it.
Maybe there was nothing left for Rachel to wake up for. She remembered all too vividly now.
Her husband was dead.
Two children were out there somewhere. And the kidnapper no longer had any reason to keep them alive.
It was terrible, and she could do nothing.
She felt moisture well in her eyes. Thicker than tears and yet so liquid. The bandage wrapped around her head suddenly felt tighter against her eyelids.
Am I crying blood? she wondered, trying not to succumb to the grief and impotence. What good would it do to sob? It would bring only pain that no medicine they could administer would soften.
She heard the door open quietly and felt the air from the corridor seep into the silent room, registered the sounds.
Footsteps on the hard floor. Measured. Too careful.
A concerned doctor, now studying Rachel’s heart rhythms? A nurse wondering how long before the respirator would no longer be of use?
“Are you awake, Isabel?” a voice whispered amid the dogged pumping of machines.
It made her start. She didn’t know why.
Then she nodded, imperceptibly. Apparently it was enough.
She felt the hand take hold of her own. Like when she was a child feeling left out in the school playground. Like the time she had stood outside the dancing school without the courage to go inside.
The same hand had given her comfort then. A warm, loving, and unselfish hand. Her brother’s. Her wonderful, protective older brother.
And at that moment, when she finally felt she was safe, the urge to scream mounted inside her.
“Yes, that’s right, Isabel,” her brother said. “Let it all out. Have a good cry. Everything’s going to be all right. You’re both going to make it. You and your friend.”
We’re going to make it? She repeated his words to herself as a question, struggling to regain control of her voice, her tongue, her breathing.
Help us, she wanted to say. Search my car. Find his address in the glove compartment. The GPS will tell you where we’ve been. It’ll be the arrest of your life.
She was ready to kneel before Rachel’s Lord in heaven, if only He would give her the power of speech for just a moment. Just for a single breath.
But she lay there mute and could only listen to the rattle of her throat. To words that dissolved into consonants and vowels, consonants and vowels that dissolved into saliva bubbling between her teeth.
Why had she not called her brother when she had the chance? Why hadn’t she done the right thing? Had she thought she was some kind of superhuman who could stop the Devil himself?
“You’re lucky you weren’t driving, Isabel. You’ll be prosecuted, of course, though I don’t think they’ll get a conviction for incitement to dangerous driving. You’ll have to get yourself a new car, though.” He forced a chuckle.
But there was nothing to laugh about.
“What happened, Isabel?” he asked, though she hadn’t yet shown herself able to speak.
She pursed her lips slightly. Perhaps he might understand. Just a part of it.
Then came the sound of a dark voice over by Rachel’s bed.
“I’m sorry, but we shall have to send you out again, Mr. Jønsson. Isabel’s going to be transferred now. Perhaps you might like to visit the cafeteria in the meantime. We’ll be sure to let you know where Isabel’s been moved to when you come back. Say, in about half an hour?”
She didn’t recognize the voice as one of those from earlier in the day.
But when the voice spoke again, and her brother finally got to his feet, giving her hand a squeeze to say he would be back later, she knew it was no use.
For she knew the voice, now the only voice left in the room.
She knew it all too well.
For a brief time, she had thought it might give her something to live for.
Now she realized that nothing could be further from the truth.
39
Carl had spent the night with Mona and almost dislocated every joint in his body. This time, she had waited for neither sweet words nor assurances that she was the only woman in his life. She had simply heaved her blouse over her head and got rid of her knickers with unfathomable dexterity.
Afterward, it had taken him half an hour to realize where he was, and the other half to consider whether he would survive another bout.
She was a different woman since she had come back from Africa. So very much there, so very present all of a sudden. The fine lines around her eyes took his breath away. The slight upward curl of her painted lips would become, in a moment, a smile that could strip him of all his thoughts.
If ever there were a woman for him, she was the one, he thought to himself as she came to him again with her warm breath, clawing him softly with her nails.
The next morning, when she woke him up, she was already dressed and ready for the day. Sensual, smiling, soaring.
What more evidence did a man need, still pinned down by his duvet, legs heavy as lead?
This woman was superior to him in every way.
“What is the matter with you, Carl?” Assad asked as they climbed into the car.
Carl hadn’t the energy to answer. How could he, when his body felt like he had been run over by a bus and his nuts were throbbing like a pair of gumboils?
“Vedbysønder coming up here,” said Assad, after the best part of an hour watching the stripes in the middle of the road pass by.
Carl looked up from the GPS and gazed out at a small cluster of farms and cottages, a landscape of fields. Sparsely populated. Decent road surface. Trees and patches of dense vegetation. A good place to collect a ransom.
“Continue on past the building there.” Assad pointed down the road. “We cross over a bridge, and there we must peel our eyes.”
As soon as the first farmhouse appeared by the railway bridge, Carl recognized the place Martin Holt had described to him. Cottages on both sides of the road. The railway running behind the houses on the left. A little farther on a couple of buildings on their own, and then, at an angle, an unpaved byroad leading off toward the tracks. After that, a narrow band of trees and thicker vegetation on the bend. This was the place where at least two of the kidnapper’s victims had dropped their money from the train.
They pulled in at the byroad, which dipped under a little viaduct, switching on the blue light so as to be clearly seen if another vehicle should happen by in the morning haze.
Carl got out of the car with difficulty and considered perking himself up with a smoke. Assad already had his eyes fixed on the earth at his feet.
“It is wet here,” he said, mostly to himself. “Quite wet. It may have been raining recently but not so much. See for yourself.”
He pointed to a set of wheel tracks, clearly visible in the dirt.
“Look. A car drew forward to this place here, very slowly,” he said, getting down on his haunches. “And here he accelerated away, like he was in a hurry.”
Carl nodded. “Either that, or the wheels just span with it being so wet.”
&n
bsp; Carl lit his cigarette and looked around. They knew two men had thrown bags containing ransom money out of a train window onto the field here, but neither of them had seen the car. All they had seen was the flashing strobe light.
In both cases, the train had come from the east, so the bags could have landed anywhere on the field right up to the cottage that stood on its own a couple of hundred meters away. The place looked like it had been done up only recently, so maybe the owners hadn’t been here in 2004 when Flemming Emil Madsen’s father made his drop. Even if they had, they were hardly likely to have seen anything that could give the police something to go on. It was usually the way.
Carl reached his hands behind his neck and stretched, exhaling smoke into the damp air that rose up from the earth with the burgeoning warmth of March. The scent of Mona was still in his nostrils. How the fuck was he expected to think straight now? How could he think about anything but seeing her again?
“Look, Carl. There is a car leaving the house up there.” Assad pointed toward the cottage. “Should we stop it, do you think?”
Carl dropped his cigarette and ground it beneath the sole of his shoe.
The woman behind the wheel looked disconcerted as she pulled in behind the flashing blue light.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is there something the matter with my lights?”
Carl gave a shrug. How was he supposed to know? “We’re interested in this piece of land here. Does it belong to you?”
She nodded. “Up to the trees over there. What about it?”
“Hi, I am Hafez el-Assad,” said Assad, extending a hairy mitt through the car window. “Have you ever seen anyone throw anything from the train here?”
“No, I don’t think so. When were you thinking of?” the woman asked. Her eyes were livelier now that she realized they weren’t about to give her a ticket.
“More than once. Some years ago, perhaps. Have you ever seen a car waiting here?”
“Not years ago. We only moved in recently.” She smiled, plainly relieved. “We’ve just finished rebuilding. You can see we’ve still got the scaffolding around the back.” She pointed toward the house, then turned her gaze to Carl. Perhaps he looked more like a man who knew about scaffolding than Assad.
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