A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “So you consider Hardy and Anker to have been your friends, is that right?”

  “Mates, yeah. Good colleagues.”

  “There’s a difference.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know if you have a quadriplegic living in your front room, but I have. Doesn’t that qualify me as his friend?”

  “You misunderstand me. I’m in no doubt that you’re a very decent guy in many ways. You’ve probably felt rather guilty about Hardy Henningsen, so I quite understand you’d want to make a special effort in his case. But are you sure your working relationship was as good as you make it out to be?”

  “Yes, I am.” This Kris bloke was irritating as fuck.

  “Anker Høyer’s autopsy revealed traces of cocaine in his blood. Were you aware of that?”

  Carl sank back in what purported to be an armchair. No, he most certainly was not aware of it at all.

  “Do you use cocaine, Carl?”

  Somehow, the man’s clear blue eyes, previously candidly assessing, were beginning to seem hostile. He had flirted brazenly with him in Mona’s presence. That gay twinkle, lips pursed and smiling at the same time. And now here he was giving Carl the third degree.

  “Cocaine? No, I don’t. I hate all that shit.”

  Kris the psychologist raised his hands in a mock defensive gesture. “OK, let’s take this somewhere else. Did you have anything to do with Hardy’s wife before she and Hardy married?”

  “Are we going to talk about her again?” He glared at the guy, who just sat there impassive as a statue.

  “I knew her,” he said after a moment. “She was a friend of a girlfriend of mine. That’s how she and Hardy met.”

  “And there was no sexual relationship of any kind?”

  Carl snorted. The man had his nose in everywhere. But how all this was supposed to get rid of the pain in his chest, he had no idea.

  “You hesitate. Was there?”

  “What kind of counseling is this, anyway? When do you get the thumbscrews out? The answer to your question is no. Petting, that’s all.”

  “Petting? What would that cover?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Kris. You may be gay, but surely you can at least imagine mutual bodily exploration of a heterosexual nature?”

  “So you got—”

  “Listen, I’m not giving details, OK? We snogged and had a good grope, but there was no shagging. Satisfied?”

  Kris noted it down.

  Then his blue eyes returned to Carl. “To get back to the case. Let’s call it the nail-gun case, shall we? Hardy Henningsen’s reports suggest that you may have been in contact with those who were later responsible for the shooting. Is that right?”

  “No, it fucking well isn’t! He must have got the wrong idea.”

  “OK.” He sent Carl the kind of look intended to encourage confidentiality. “The thing is, Carl, if you go to bed with an itchy arse, your fingers are likely to stink when you get up in the morning.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. Not him as well?

  “Are you cured, then?” Rose asked when he got back to their corridor. He smiled, perhaps rather too ingratiatingly.

  “Very funny, Rose. Next time I’m there, I’ll put you down for a course in etiquette.”

  “Like that, is it?” She was digging her heels in already. “I hope you’re not expecting me to be friendly and PC all at once.”

  Friendly? Jesus Christ!

  “What have you got on those two women, Rose?”

  She gave names, addresses, and ages. Middle-aged, both of them. No known associations with criminal elements. Regular citizens.

  “I haven’t got around to Intensive Care yet. I’ll get on to them in a minute.”

  “Who owned the vehicle they crashed? I think I forgot to ask.”

  “Haven’t you read the accident report? The owner was Isabel Jønsson, but the other woman, Lisa Karin Krogh, was the one driving.”

  “Yeah, I know that. Are they Church of Denmark?”

  “All over the place, these questions, aren’t they?”

  “I need to know. Are they?”

  She gave a shrug.

  “Find out for me, Rose. And if they’re not, I want you to find out what denomination they otherwise might subscribe to.”

  “What am I, a journalist?”

  He was just about to hit the roof but found himself interrupted by a sudden commotion of yells and cries from somewhere in the vicinity of the mail department.

  “What’s going on?” Assad exclaimed.

  “How should I know?” Carl snarled back. All he could see was a man standing at the other end of the corridor with the sidepiece from a steel shelving unit raised above his head, and then one of the uniformed boys leaping from the adjoining corridor to send him flying. The sidepiece came down hard in the process, and the officer fell back in a heap.

  At the same moment, the man caught sight of the assembled three members of Department Q, and without hesitation he began to charge toward them wielding the piece of steel. Rose retreated, but Assad stayed put next to Carl.

  “Maybe we should let the lads upstairs take care of this, Assad? Get the duty officer down?” Carl suggested, over the man’s unintelligible shouts.

  But Assad didn’t answer. He braced himself, legs bent at the knee, upper body leaning forward with his arms out like a wrestler. Their prospective assailant, however, was unperturbed, a fact he would very soon come to regret. At the instant he raised his improvised weapon above his head to strike, Assad sprang into the air and grabbed it with both hands. The effect was astonishing.

  The man’s arms buckled at the elbow, and Assad brought down the steel against his shoulder with such force that the crunch of breaking bone was clearly audible.

  Presumably for form’s sake, Assad completed his counterstrike by delivering a firm kick to the attacker’s muscle-bound abdomen. It was not a pretty sight, and the sounds that escaped from the desperate man were of the kind a person would hope never to hear again. Carl had never seen anyone so berserk neutralized so swiftly.

  While the man on the floor writhed in pain from his fractured collarbone and Assad’s pinpoint strike to his guts, uniformed officers came running.

  Only then did Carl notice the handcuffs dangling from the wrist of the man’s right hand.

  “We’d just brought him in from Yard 4 on his way to the Magistrates’ Court,” one of the uniformed guys said, snapping shut the handcuffs on the man’s other wrist. “God knows how he managed to get the cuffs off, but the next thing we know he’s away through the cargo hatch and on his way down to the mail department.”

  “He wouldn’t have got far,” a second officer said. Carl knew him. An excellent marksman.

  It was pats on the back from all around for Assad. What did they care if he had put their charge in the hospital?

  “Who is he, anyway?” Carl asked.

  “Seems he might be the guy who bumped off three Serbian debt collectors in the space of the last two weeks.”

  And now Carl saw the ring grown into the flesh of the man’s little finger.

  Carl’s eye caught Assad’s. He didn’t seem surprised in the slightest.

  “I saw that,” said a voice behind Carl’s back as the officers dragged the groaning Serb back where he had come from.

  Carl swiveled. It was Valde, one of the retired officers who presided over the Burial Club. Deputy chairman, as far as Carl recalled.

  “What the hell are you doing here on a Wednesday, Valde? I thought you lot only met up on Tuesdays?”

  Valde chortled and stroked his beard. “Well, we were all out for Jannik’s birthday yesterday. His seventieth, so you can imagine. No going soft on tradition there, I’ll tell you.”

  He turned to Assad. “Bloody hell, mate. I wouldn’t mind seeing that again. Where did you pick up tricks like that?”

  Assad gave a shrug. “Action and reaction. That’s all.”

  Valde nodded. “Come into the parlor. You deserve a Gammel Dansk.”


  “Gammel Dansk?” Assad was mystified.

  “Assad doesn’t drink alcohol, Valde,” Carl explained. “He’s a Muslim. I’ll have his.”

  They were all there. Mostly former traffic police, but Jannik the maintenance supervisor, too, and one of the commissioner’s old chauffeurs.

  Sandwiches, cigarettes, black coffee, and Gammel Dansk. Pensioners were on a cushy number at Police HQ.

  “You bearing up all right, Carl?” one of them asked. A bloke he’d sometimes had dealings with in the Gladsaxe Police District.

  Carl nodded.

  “Dreadful business what happened to Hardy and Anker. Very nasty case indeed. Did you ever get to the bottom of it?”

  “Can’t say we did.” He turned his gaze to the window above the row of tables. “You lot don’t know you’re born, having daylight in here. We could do with some ourselves.”

  The Burial Club all frowned at once.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “All the rooms down here have got windows in them,” one of them said.

  “Not where we are they haven’t.”

  Jannik, the maintenance supervisor, got to his feet. “I’ve been here thirty-seven years, and I know every nook and cranny in this old place. Would you be kind enough to show me this room of yours. I’ve to be getting on soon.”

  So much for his Gammel Dansk.

  “There you go,” Carl said a minute later. He gestured at the wall to which his flatscreen was affixed. “Where’s this window of yours, then?”

  Jannik peered. “What do you call that?” He pointed straight at the wall.

  “Erm, a wall?”

  “It’s plasterboard, Carl. Plasterboard. My lot put it up when this place was turned into a stockroom. There were shelving units all over. Here, and further along where that cute little secretary of yours is. Same shelves the Support Unit later used to store all those helmets and visors. Same shelves that are cluttering up the bloody place now.” He laughed. “Couldn’t work it out, eh, Carl? Do you want me to knock a hole through so you can see out, or can you do it yourself?”

  He could hardly credit it. “What about the other side?” He gestured toward Assad’s cubbyhole.

  “That place? That’s never been an office, Carl. It’s a broom cupboard. There’s no window in there.”

  “OK. I reckon Rose and I can do without, too, in that case. Maybe later, once they’ve finished clearing this place out and I find Assad another office.”

  Jannik shook his head and chuckled.

  “Hell of a bloody mess they’re making down here,” he said as they stood for a moment in the corridor. “What’s that there in aid of?” He pointed to what was left of the plasterboard partition, the remains of which were now lined up along the wall from Assad’s case overviews and on past Rose’s office.

  “We put up a dividing wall because of those pipes there. There’s asbestos falling from them, apparently. Health and Safety kicked up a fuss.”

  “What, them?” The maintenance supervisor jerked a finger at the ceiling as he turned to go back to his Gammel Dansk. “You can pull all them down if you want. The heating pipes run through the crawl space now. Those ones on the ceiling have got no use anymore.”

  His laugh echoed through most of the basement.

  Carl had hardly stopped swearing when Rose appeared. Maybe she’d been doing her job for once.

  “They’re both alive, Carl. Lisa Karin Krogh is still critical, but the other one’s going to pull through. They’re pretty sure of that now.”

  He nodded. In that case, they’d better get out there and have a word with her.

  “As for their religious affiliations, Isabel Jønsson is regular Church of Denmark, and Lisa Krogh belongs to something called the Mother Church. I spoke to their neighbor in Frederiks. It seems to be a weird sect that keeps itself to itself. The neighbor woman reckoned Lisa Krogh’s husband had been dragged into it by his wife. The husband calls himself Joshua, and she goes by the name of Rachel.”

  Carl took a deep breath.

  “But that’s not all,” she went on, shaking her head. “Local plod in Slagelse found a duffel bag in the undergrowth at the scene of the accident. Slung out of the vehicle when it crashed, so it seems. And what do you think’s in it? Only a million kroner in used notes, that’s all.”

  “Now I have heard it all,” Carl heard Assad say just behind him. “Almighty Allah!”

  Almighty Allah, indeed. Carl’s words exactly.

  Rose cocked her head. “And to top it all, I’ve just found out that Lisa Karin Krogh’s husband dropped dead on the train between Slagelse and Sorø on Monday evening. About the same time his wife crashed the car. Heart attack, the autopsy says.”

  “Fucking hell,” Carl exclaimed with a mounting sense of foreboding. He almost felt a shiver run down his spine.

  “I’ll just stop in and see how Hardy’s doing before we go up to Intensive Care,” said Carl. He took the STOP paddle they used to pull in traffic offenders and put it on the dashboard where it could be seen through the windscreen. It was a good way of placating meter attendants in cases of dodgy parking.

  “You stay outside, OK? There’s a couple of things I need to ask him.”

  Carl found Hardy in a room with a view. Big windows filled with sky, ragged clouds like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle someone had dropped on the floor.

  Hardy said he was doing fine. His lungs were on the mend and the tests almost done. “But they don’t believe me when I say I can twitch my wrist,” he said.

  Carl let it pass. What good would it do, to crush his hopes?

  “I had a session with a shrink today, Hardy. Not Mona, some twerp called Kris. He told me you’d put some things down about me in a report. A report I’ve never seen. Does that ring a bell?”

  “All I wrote was that you knew the case better than me and Anker.”

  “Why would you feel the need to say that?”

  “Because you did. You knew Georg Madsen, the old guy we found murdered.”

  “No I didn’t, Hardy. I’d never seen him before in my life.”

  “Come off it, you used him as a witness in another case. I don’t recall the details, but I remember you did.”

  “You’re remembering wrong, Hardy.” Carl shook his head. “Anyway, it makes no difference now. I’m here on other business. Just thought I’d pop in and see how you were doing. Assad says to say hello. He’s here, too.”

  Hardy raised his eyebrows. “Before you go, Carl, there’s something I want you to promise me.”

  “Anything at all, mate. Just say the word.”

  Hardy swallowed a couple of times before revealing what was on his mind. “Let me come back to your place again. If I can’t, I’ll die.”

  Carl looked him in the eye. If anyone could prompt his own expiry by willpower alone, it was Hardy.

  “No problem, Hardy,” he replied softly.

  Vigga could stay put with that Gherkin bloke of hers from Turbanistan.

  They stood waiting for the lift at Entrance 3 when the doors opened and one of Carl’s old instructors from the police academy stepped out.

  “Karsten!” Carl exclaimed, extending a hand in greeting. He received a smile in return when the man eventually recognized him.

  “Carl Mørck,” he said after a pause. “Older now, I see.”

  Carl smiled. Karsten Jønsson. Another promising career that had ended up in the traffic department. Another policeman who had moved sideways so as not to let the system grind him down.

  They stood for a moment, exchanging reminiscences and a few words about how being on the force was so much harder now than it used to be, and then they shook hands to say good-bye.

  But somehow shaking Karsten Jønsson’s hand gave Carl an odd feeling, before his brain registered why. An unsettling, indefinable something that brought his system to a standstill. First this feeling, then the realization that he was missing something.

  It came to him at once. Of course! It was too m
uch of a coincidence.

  The man seemed dejected, Carl reflected. He had stepped out of the lift that went up to Intensive Care. His name was Jønsson. That was it.

  “Tell me, Karsten, are you here because of Isabel Jønsson?” he asked.

  The man nodded. “She’s my younger sister. How would you be involved?” He shook his head, unable to see the connection. “Aren’t you Department A?”

  “Not anymore. But listen, there’s no need to worry. I’ve got a couple of questions I need to ask her, that’s all.”

  “You’ll have a job. Her jaw’s immobilized, and she’s heavily sedated. I’ve just been with her, and she didn’t say a word. They sent me out again. Seems she’s being transferred to another department. They told me to wait in the cafeteria for half an hour.”

  “OK. I think we’ll go up anyway before they move her. Nice running into you, Karsten.”

  Another lift pinged its arrival, and a man in a white coat stepped out.

  He glanced at them with a somber look.

  They stepped in and pressed the button.

  Carl had seen the unit countless times before. People unfortunate enough to get in the way of lunatics with weapons often ended up here. Last stop but one for the victims of violent crime.

  The medical staff who worked here were top-notch. Of all places on earth, this was where he would probably want to come if things really went wrong.

  He and Assad went through the doors and into a hive of activity. It looked like they’d walked in on an emergency. Not the best of times to appear, he could see that.

  He showed his ID at the desk and presented Assad as well. “We’re here to ask Isabel Jønsson a few questions. I’m afraid it’s quite urgent.”

  “And I’m afraid that won’t be possible at the moment. Lisa Karin Krogh, who’s in the same room as Isabel Jønsson, just passed away a few minutes ago, and Isabel has taken a turn for the worse. Besides that, one of our nurses has just been attacked. There was a man here. He may have tried to kill them, we don’t know yet. Everything’s chaos. The nurse is unconscious.”