The Purity of Vengeance (7 page)

“Hey, hang on a minute! You can’t just let him go, for Chrissake!” Bak protested, only to stop when Assad turned toward him and spoke calmly.

“He’s
my
man now, Bak, can’t you see? You don’t think about him anymore, are you with me?”

Bak’s face went white for a moment before the color returned. Assad exuded the air of a hydrogen bomb that had just been armed and prepared for release. The case was out of Bak’s hands, and there was nothing he could do.

The last they saw of the Lithuanian as he opened the door was his dragon tattoo and the shoe he almost lost in the hurry. The transformation was total. The veneer scraped away. What was left was a boy of twenty-five, running for his life.

“Now you can tell your sister you have avenged her,” Assad sniffled. “You will never see this man again, I promise you!”

Carl frowned, but said nothing until they were outside on the pavement by the car.

“What happened in there, Assad?” he asked. “What did you do to him? And what was all that about thirty hours?”

“I took him by the scruff of the neck, Carl, and mentioned some names. Names of people who could be let loose on him and his family if he did not leave the country immediately. I told him I did not care what he did now, but that he should hide himself away very carefully if they were not to find him.” Assad nodded. “But they will, if they so wish.”

There were years of accumulated distrust in the look Bak sent Assad. “There’s only one thing people like him respect, and that’s the Russian mafia,” said Bak. “And you’re not going to tell me you’ve got a say there.” He waited for Assad’s answer, but none was forthcoming. “Which means you’ve let him off scot-free, you idiot.”

Assad tipped his head to one side and peered at Bak with bleary eyes. “I think you should say to your sister that everything is sorted now. Should we not be getting back, Carl? I feel the need for a cup of hot tea.”

5

November 2010

Carl’s gaze wavered back
and forth between the case folder on his desk and the flatscreen on the wall. Neither was particularly appealing. On TV2’s news channel the foreign minister teetered about on her high heels, trying to look competent while tame journalists nodded and deferred to the daggers in her eyes, and on the desk in front of him lay the folder concerning his uncle’s drowning in 1978.

It was like choosing between plague and cholera.

He scratched behind his ear and closed his eyes. What a bloody awful day. Nowhere near as inactive and unstructured as he had hoped.

There was a whole meter of new unresolved cases on the shelf, two of which had already captured Rose’s imagination. In particular the one about Rita Nielsen, the brothel owner who had disappeared in Copenhagen. It was a state of affairs that did not bode well. But to make matters worse, Assad was in his cubbyhole on the other side of the corridor, sniffling snot back up his nose every seven seconds and emitting multitudes of bacteria into the communal air. The man was at death’s door, yet less than an hour and a half ago he’d smacked a hardened criminal up against a wall and issued threats so definitive the guy had fled for his life with terror written all over his face. What the hell was it with this Assad? Even his old mate Anker, who could scare the shit out of just about anyone, had been a Boy Scout by comparison.

And then there was the sudden echo from Carl’s past. Why had his cousin, Ronny, been sounding off in a bar in Thailand about his uncle’s death not being an accident, when Carl knew for a fact it was? And how come Ronny had claimed he had killed his father himself, when Carl knew he couldn’t have? He and Carl had been together, ogling two pairs of tits up on Hjørringvej when it occurred, so it couldn’t possibly have been Ronny. And now here Bak was, telling him Ronny had said
Carl
had been in on it.

Carl shook his head. He killed the TV images of the smug, empty-headed firebrand of a foreign minister and grabbed the phone.

He made four calls to four numbers, all in vain. He ran a check with the Civil Registration Office, then another couple of calls that were just as fruitless as the first. Ronny seemed to have an uncanny knack of being swallowed into oblivion by society’s ever-accumulating piles of dross.

He’d have to get Lis onto it. She could find the scumbag for him, wherever the fuck he’d hidden himself.

Thirty seconds of busy tone followed before Carl got to his feet in annoyance, his entire system clogging up with frustration. What the hell were they doing upstairs that stopped them answering the phone?

On his way up to the third floor he encountered several red-nosed individuals all looking like death warmed up. The bloody flu was all over the place. He held his hand in front of his face as he passed. “Get thee behind me, satanic virus,” he muttered to himself, nodding politely to coughing and sneezing colleagues with watery eyes and expressions so pained anyone would have thought the world was about to end.

Upstairs in homicide, however, all was quiet as the grave. As though all the killers the department’s investigators had snapped into handcuffs over the years had joined forces to strike back with biological weaponry. The department’s name suddenly seemed apt indeed. Had they all been wiped out, or what?

No steamingly libidinous Lis behind the counter with her flirty, flamingo-like poise, and even more surprisingly, no Ms. Sørensen, the miserable cow who only ever got up to go to the toilet.

“Where the hell is everyone?” he bellowed, making even the staplers rattle.

“All right, keep your fucking hair on, Carl,” came a voice from an open door, halfway down the corridor.

Carl poked his head into the chaotic office whose timeworn furniture and mountains of documents made his own tip in the basement look like a luxury suite on a cruise liner.

He nodded to the head that was only barely visible behind the mounds of paper and repeated his question before Terje Ploug raised his flu-plagued face to peer at him.

“Where the hell is everyone? Have they all gone down in the epidemic?”

The reply said it all. Five well-delivered sneezes in quick succession, followed by assorted coughs and splutters, snot streaming from the man’s nostrils.

“O-
K
!” said Carl, with emphasis on the second syllable, and stepped back.

“Lars Bjørn’s in the briefing room with one of the teams and Marcus is out in the field,” Ploug proffered between sniffles. “But now you’re here, Carl, we’ve got a new lead in the nail-gun case. I was just about to give you a call.”

“You don’t say.” Carl removed his gaze from the man’s beacon of a nose, and his eyes drifted out of focus. It already seemed an age since he, Anker, and Hardy had been shot in that run-down shed in Amager. Would he ever be able to stop thinking about it?

“That allotment garden house where the three of you got hit after you found Georg Madsen with a nail fired into his brain was pulled down this morning,” Ploug said drily.

“About time, and all.” Carl stuck his hands in his pockets. They felt sticky.

“The bulldozers were very thorough. Took away the topsoil down to the clay.”

“So what did they find?” Carl asked, already loath to hear more. Bastard case.

“A wooden box knocked together with Paslode nails. Inside was a sack containing body parts in various states of decay. They turned it up an hour ago and made the call straightaway. Marcus is out there now with the SOCOs.”

Bollocks. He and Hardy would have no peace for a while yet.

“There’s not much doubt this one’s connected with the murders of Georg Madsen and those other two in Sorø who were done in with a nail gun, too,” Ploug went on, dabbing his streaming eyes with a handkerchief that by rights ought to have been incinerated under expert supervision.

“And what makes you think that?”

“Whoever it was, there was a relatively long nail buried in his skull.”

Carl nodded. Just like the others. It was a reasonable deduction.

“I’d like you to go with me to the scene in half an hour.”

“Me? What for? It’s not my case anymore.”

If the expression on Terje Ploug’s face was anything to go by, Carl could just as well have said that from now on he was going to wear nothing but pink camel-wool sweaters and deal only with cases involving three-legged Dalmatians.

“Marcus is of a different opinion,” was all Ploug said.

Of course it was Carl’s case, too. A pale scar at his temple reminded him of it on a daily basis. The brand of Cain that told of cowardice and an inability to act decisively at the most crucial moment of his life.

Carl passed his eyes over Ploug’s walls. They were covered with photos from crime scenes, enough to fill a medium-sized packing case.

“OK,” he said eventually. “But I’ll drive myself,” he added, an octave lower than normal. No way was he going to ride shotgun in Ploug’s bacteriological blender. He’d even prefer to walk.

“What on earth are you doing here?” inquired Ms. Sørensen from behind the counter, when Carl passed by the secretaries’ domain a few moments later, his head spinning with images from the fateful day when Anker lost his life and Hardy his mobility.

In an odd, portentous sort of way, her voice seemed almost mild and accommodating. Carl turned slowly, sarcastic jibes honed and ready to counter.

She was only a couple of meters away and yet she looked different somehow. He could just as easily have been looking at a dot in the distance.

It wasn’t because she was dressed any differently than usual. She still looked like she’d wandered blindfolded into a secondhand shop. But her eyes, and her normally dry, now rather short hair, shone and glistened like patent leather shoes at a ball. Worst of all, two red blotches now spread across her cheeks, signaling not only excellent blood circulation, but also, and more alarmingly, that there might be more life in her than he had thought.

“Nice to see you,” she said. As if life wasn’t surreal enough as it was.

“Hmm,” Carl grunted. Who would dare say more? “Don’t suppose you know where Lis has got to? Is she ill like everyone else?” he asked with caution, prepared to be showered with invective and bile.

“She’s over in the briefing room taking down notes, but she’ll be down in the archive later. Do you want me to tell her to pop by?”

Carl swallowed. Did she say “pop by”? Did he really just hear Ilse the She-Devil, alias Ms. Sørensen, use such a breezy expression?

In this moment of bewilderment he sent her a crumpled smile and steered purposefully toward the stairwell.

 • • • 

“Yes, boss,” Assad sniffled. “What did you wish to speak to me about?”

Carl’s eyes narrowed. “It’s very simple, Assad. You’re going to tell me exactly what happened in that back room on Eskildsgade.”

“What happened? Only that the man pricked up his ears.”

“I see. But why, Assad? Who and what did you threaten him with? You don’t frighten the pants off a hard-case villain from the Baltics by reading him Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, do you?”

“Oh, but they can be terrifying. Think for example about the one with the girl and the poisoned apple . . .”

Carl gave a sigh. “Andersen didn’t write
Snow White
, Assad, OK? Now, who did you threaten him with?”

Assad hesitated, before taking a deep breath and looking Carl straight in the eye. “I just told him I was keeping his driving license so as to fax it on to some people I worked with before, and that he should go home to his family and get them away from their house, because if there was anyone home when my contacts came, or if he was still in Denmark at that time, the house would go up in smoke.”

“The house would go up in smoke? Do you know what, I don’t think we should mention that to anyone, Assad, are you with me?” Carl paused demonstratively, but Assad’s gaze didn’t waver.

“But the guy believed you, so it seems,” Carl went on. “Why would he do that? Who did you tell him you were going to send that fax to? Who was he so afraid of?”

Assad pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. Carl saw Linas Verslovas’s name as Assad unfolded it. Beneath the name was a rather unflattering photo, albeit a good likeness, plus a few brief details and a lot of gibberish in a language Carl failed to recognize.

“I pulled some information before we went and ‘had a word’ with the man,” Assad explained, scratching quotation marks in the air. “It’s from some friends of mine in Vilnius. They can go into the police archives when they want.”

Carl frowned.

“Are you saying you got this from people in Lithuanian intelligence?”

Assad nodded, detaching a dribble of snot from the tip of his nose.

“And these people read you a translation over the phone?”

Another dribble.

“I see. Not the most uplifting reading, I imagine. And then you threatened this Linas Verslovas with the secret police, or whatever they call themselves, saying they’d carry out reprisals against his family? Did he really have reason to believe they would?”

Assad shrugged.

Carl reached across the desk and pulled over a plastic folder of documents. “I’ve had your case file from the Danish Immigration Service lying around here ever since your first day in the basement, Assad. And now I’ve finally got round to having a look at it.”

Carl felt a pair of dark eyes resting heavily on the top of his skull.

“As far as I can make out, everything you’ve told me about your background is here to the last detail.” He looked up at his assistant.

“Of course, Carl. What did you expect?”

“But that’s
all
there is. There’s nothing here about what you did before you came to Denmark. Nothing about what made you eligible for residence here, or who took care of your remarkably swiftly approved asylum application. Nothing about your wife or children, when and where they were born, nothing about their backgrounds. Just the names, that’s all. To my mind, this is an oddly unrepresentative and incomplete set of data we’ve got here. A person might think it had been subjected to a bit of editing.”

Assad shrugged again. These were shoulders that were apparently the seat of some universal syntax comprising a veritable abundance of nuances.