The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “A-hemmm,” he ventured, making a show of clearing his throat in the hope of startling his emo malcontent of a secretary into shame, but she didn’t even bother to look up.

  “Talk of the devil,” she said without the slightest embarrassment, and handed him some papers. “Have a look at what I’ve highlighted in the Rita Nielsen case and think yourself lucky you’ve got staff looking after the shop while certain others are off swanning about the countryside.”

  Oh, Christ. Was she back at this stage already? If they didn’t watch out they’d have her so-called twin sister Yrsa turning up before they knew what had hit them.

  “You were upstairs asking after me?” said Lis, as Rose’s shadow vanished into her office.

  “Yeah, I’ve been trying to track down my cousin, Ronny, without any luck and was wondering if . . .”

  “Oh, that.” For a moment she looked disappointed. “Bak told us the bare bones of it. What a performance. I’ll see what I can do.”

  She flashed him a smile that turned his kneecaps into jelly, then headed for the archive.

  “Just a minute, Lis,” Carl blurted, stopping her in her tracks. “What the hell’s the score with Ms. Sørensen up there? All of a sudden she’s . . . well, I was going to say pleasant . . .”

  “She’s started on a course in NLP.”

  “NLP? Refresh my memory . . .”

  But then Carl’s mobile chimed. Morten Holland, the display read. What would his lodger be wanting him for now?

  “Yeah, what is it, Morten?” he said, giving Lis an apologetic nod.

  “Am I interrupting?” came Morten’s cautious voice.

  “Did the iceberg interrupt the Titanic? Did Brutus interrupt Caesar? What’s up? Is Hardy all right?”

  “Well, sort of, yeah. Nice one, by the way, the iceberg interrupting the Titanic. Ha, ha! Anyway, Hardy wants a word.”

  He heard the rustle as the phone was placed at Hardy’s ear on the pillow. These calls were a bad habit Morten and Hardy had got into. It used to suffice for Carl and Hardy to have a bedside chat in the evenings when Carl got home, but apparently that was no good anymore.

  “Can you hear me, Carl?” Carl pictured the big man paralyzed in his bed with Morten pressing the phone to his ear. Eyes half shut, a frown on his face, lips parched. Hardy was worried about something, Carl could tell by the sound of his voice. Most likely Terje Ploug had already been on to him.

  “Ploug called,” he said. “I suppose you know what about?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK, so what’s the story, Carl? Tell me.”

  “It’s about the bastards who shot us being coldblooded killers and stopping at nothing to ensure discipline in the ranks.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant.” There was a pause. The unpleasant kind. The kind that usually ended in confrontation.

  “Do you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking Anker was up to his neck in that shit. He knew there was a dead body in that allotment house before we went out there.”

  “OK. And what brings you to that conclusion, Hardy?”

  “I just know. He changed so much in that period. Started spending more money than before. His personality changed. And he didn’t go by the book that day.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He went over to the neighbor to question him before we’d even been inside Georg Madsen’s place. But how could he know for sure there was a body?”

  “The neighbor reported it.”

  “Come off it, Carl. How many times have people reported things like that, and how many times has it turned out the smell was a dead dog and the noise came from the television or the radio? Anker always went in to check if it was a false alarm before going out into the field. Only that day he didn’t.”

  “How come you’re telling me this now? Haven’t you had time before, or what?”

  “Remember when Minna and I put Anker up at ours when his wife booted him out?”

  “No.”

  “It was only for a while, but Anker was in a bad way. He was sniffing coke.”

  “Yeah, that shrink, Kris, told me, the one Mona let loose on me. I had no idea at the time.”

  “He got into a fight one night he was out on the town. He had blood all over his clothes.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “A lot of blood, Carl. He threw them in the bin.”

  “So now you see a connection between that and the body that turned up today?”

  The same pause. Hardy had been one of the best detectives at Police HQ when he’d still been able to stand up. “Insight and intuition” was how he explained it. Hardy and his bloody intuition.

  “Let’s wait and see what the autopsy says, Hardy.”

  “The skull in the box had no teeth, am I right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the body was completely decomposed?”

  “Something like that, yeah. Not soup, but almost.”

  “We’re not likely to find out who he was, then, are we?”

  “Can’t be helped, I’m afraid, Hardy.”

  “That’s easy enough for you to say, Carl. You’re not the one lying here with a tube in his guts, staring up at the ceiling all day long, are you? If Anker was mixed up in that shit, then it’s his fucking fault I’m here. That’s why I’m calling you, Carl. So you keep a fucking eye on that case. And if Ploug starts arsing it up, you fucking owe it to your old mate here to make sure he gets it right, do you hear?”

  When Morten Holland repeated his apologies and hung up, Carl found himself sitting on the edge of his chair with Rose’s papers in his lap. How on earth he’d propelled himself into his office without noticing, he had no idea.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to picture Anker in his mind’s eye, but his former colleague’s features were already erased.

  How could he possibly remember Anker’s pupils and nostrils, his voice, and all the other things that gave away a cocaine habit?

  8

  November 2010

  “Have you seen Rose’s highlights in the Rita Nielsen case, Carl?”

  Carl looked up and almost fell about laughing. Assad stood waving a handful of documents in front of him. Apparently he’d found a remedy for his dribbling nose. Protruding from each nostril was a bung of cotton wool of such dimension as to explain why his usual filtering out of all sibilants, conspicuous at the best of times, was now even more pronounced.

  “What highlights? Where?” Carl replied, stifling a grin.

  “The case about the woman who disappeared in Copenhagen. The brothel lady, Rita Nielsen.” He tossed a handful of photocopies onto the desk. “Rose is making phone calls. In the meantime she wants us to look at these.”

  Carl picked up the copies and gestured toward Assad’s cotton wool. “Take those plugs out, eh, Assad? I can’t concentrate.”

  “But then I will dribble, Carl.”

  “Then dribble, if you must. Just make sure you do it on the floor.” He nodded as the tampons were consigned to the bin, and turned his attention to Rose’s documents. “What highlights?”

  Assad leaned perilously close and flicked through the sheets. “Here,” he said, pointing to a number of lines highlighted in red.

  Carl skimmed the page. It was a detailing of the state in which Rita Nielsen’s abandoned Mercedes had been found, and Rose’s red pen had underlined what few effects had been retrieved from the glove compartment. A tourist guide of northern Italy, some throat drops, a pack of paper handkerchiefs, a couple of brochures about Florence, and four cassette tapes of Madonna songs.

  Nørrebro’s purveyors of stolen goods obviously hadn’t been confident of finding a market for Madonna, Carl thought to himself, noticing that Rose had doubly underscored the sentence “Cassette of Who’s That Girl found to be without contents.” Did they mean “contents�
�� or “content”? Carl wondered with a smile.

  “OK,” he said eventually. “Not exactly earth shattering, is it? They found an empty Madonna cassette. Will you call the newspapers or shall I?”

  Assad stared at him, perplexed. “On the next page there is some more. Oh, and I think the pages are back to front.”

  He indicated a couple more details Rose had found worthy of note. These concerned the phone call of 6 September 1987 that reported Rita Nielsen missing. It had been made by one Lone Rasmussen of Kolding, a woman who worked for Rita Nielsen, looking after the phone and managing her call girls’ appointments. She had been concerned when Rita Nielsen failed to return to Kolding on the Saturday as expected. It had been noted that Lone Rasmussen was known to police on account of a number of cases involving prostitution and drugs.

  The main sentence Rose had underlined ran: “According to Lone Rasmussen, Rita Nielsen had some particular appointment on the Sunday, because that day and those following were crossed out with diagonal red lines in the calendar Rita Nielsen kept in the massage parlor consistently referred to by Lone Rasmussen as ‘the escort service.’”

  “O-K,” Carl repeated slowly as he read on through the text. So Rita Nielsen had taken time off and was going to be unavailable in the days after she disappeared. Investigators had looked into the matter and found nothing to indicate what these days off might have involved.

  “I think Rose is trying to find this Lone Rasmussen as we speak,” Assad sniffled.

  Carl sighed. All this was twenty-three years ago. According to Lone Rasmussen’s civil registration number she would now be in her mid-seventies, an advanced age for a woman with her history. And if, against all odds, she was still alive, what could she be expected to add to such vague statements after all these years?

  “Look at this now, Carl.” Assad flicked through the pages again, stopping at a sentence he read out loud, his diction a muffled monotone of nasal congestion.

  “On searching Rita Nielsen’s flat on the tenth day of her disappearance, officers discovered a cat in such a weakened state as to necessitate destruction by veterinarians.”

  “Bugger me,” said Carl.

  “And here, too.” Assad pointed to the bottom of the page. “No evidence found to indicate any crime. Similarly, no personal documents, diaries, or anything else to suggest personal crisis. Rita Nielsen’s home appears neat, though somewhat immaturely furnished with many knick-knacks and an unusual number of framed photo clippings of Madonna. In summary, nothing to suggest either suicide or homicide.”

  Again Rose had doubly underlined a passage: “unusual number of framed photo clippings of Madonna.”

  Why had she highlighted that? Carl wiped his nose. Was he coming down with it now as well? He bloody well hoped not. He was off to Mona’s tonight.

  “I’m not sure why Rose thinks all this Madonna stuff is so important,” said Carl. “But that business about the cat might raise a few eyebrows.”

  Assad nodded. The stories people told about unmarried women and their pets were certainly not exaggerated. If they had a cat, they’d make certain it was taken care of before embarking on something as drastic as suicide. Either they went off together or else the animal was passed into good hands while there was still time.

  “I’m assuming our colleagues in Kolding thought about that,” he said, but Assad shook his head.

  “They assumed she took her life on the spur of the moment,” he replied with a sniff.

  Carl winced, then nodded. It couldn’t be ruled out, not by any means. She’d been a long way from both home and the cat, so you could never tell. People did all sorts of things.

  Rose’s voice rumbled through the corridor. “Get yourselves along here, you two. And make it sharpish.”

  Had he heard right? Was she bossing them about now? Was it no longer enough for her to decide what cases they were to pursue? If that was how she thought things worked around here she’d got another bloody thing coming, even if she did end up throwing a wobbler and mutating into Yrsa again. Rose’s alter ego may not have been quite as bright, but she wasn’t daft, not by a long chalk.

  “Come along, Carl,” said Assad, tugging at his sleeve. Apparently he was better trained.

  Rose stood in the middle of her office floor, hand covering the telephone receiver and utterly unfazed by Carl’s piercing glare of disapproval. Dressed in black from head to toe, she looked like a chimney sweep.

  “It’s Lone Rasmussen,” she whispered. “I want you to listen to what she has to say. I’ll explain afterward.”

  She put the receiver down on the desk and switched on the speaker function.

  “Right, Lone, I’ve got my boss, Carl Mørck, and his assistant with me now,” she said. “Can I ask you to repeat what you just told me?”

  OK, she called him her boss, so maybe she did still know who was in charge. Carl gave her a nod of acknowledgment. She’d done well to find Lone Rasmussen. Not bad at all.

  “Okaaay,” came a drawling voice from the other end. A coarse, lazy voice, like the ones junkies ended up with if their drug abuse continued. Not that she sounded old, just wrecked. “Can everyone hear me now?”

  Rose confirmed.

  “Well, all I said was she loved that cat. There was another girl, I can’t remember her name, who was supposed to look after it once, only she forgot and Rita got dead narked with her and gave her her marching orders. So whenever Rita was away after that, she got me to feed the thing. Tinned food, the good stuff. But it was only ever on its own when she was away for a very short time, a day or two at the most. Left its doings all over the place, it did, but Rita just cleaned up after it.”

  “So you’re saying Rita would never have left her cat without making sure there was someone to look after it?” Rose asked, helping her along.

  “That’s right, yeah! It was odd at the time. I had no idea the cat was in the flat and she’d never given me a key. She never gave her key out unless there was good reason. Otherwise I’d have known the poor thing was starving to death. Are you with me?”

  “Yes, we’re with you, Lone. But the other thing you told me just before, would you say that again, about Madonna?”

  “Oh, Rita was absolutely mad about her. Daft, she was.”

  “You said Rita was in love with her.”

  “Head over bloody heels. She never said as much, but we all knew.”

  “So Rita Nielsen was a lesbian?” Carl interjected.

  “Ooh, we’ve got a man with us now, have we?” she cackled. “Yeah, well, Rita would shag almost anything that moved, wouldn’t she?” At this point Lone Rasmussen paused suddenly and Rose’s clinical habitat was filled with the sound of a person attempting to quench a boundless thirst. “I don’t think she ever said no, to be honest,” she continued after prolonged gulping. “Only in the days she was doing it for money, and the bloke, or whoever it was, didn’t have any.”

  “You don’t think Rita committed suicide, then?” Carl went on.

  Lone’s reply was a guttural eruption of laughter, followed by prompt dismissal: “You must be bloody joking.”

  “And you’ve no idea what might have happened to her?”

  “None whatsoever. Weird, it was. But my guess is it was to do with money, even if she did have loads in the bank when the lawyers finally finished sorting out the estate. Took them eight years, if I remember right.”

  “And she left everything including her flat to Cats Protection, isn’t that right?” Rose said.

  There you go, Carl thought to himself. A woman like that would never leave her pet to die of starvation.

  “Yeah, what a waste that was. I could have done with a couple of her millions myself,” said Lone wistfully.

  “OK,” said Carl. “Just to sum up. Rita drove to Copenhagen on the Friday, and your impression was she’d be home again the next day, the Saturday. T
hat’s why she hadn’t asked you to look after the cat. After that, you assumed she slept at home in Kolding on the Saturday night, that she was going to be otherwise engaged during the days that followed, and that you might have to look after the cat, though you were unsure as to whether the cat was actually in the flat. Is that right?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “And was this a usual kind of occurrence?”

  “It was, yeah. She’d often go off for a few days. A trip to London, maybe, to see the musicals. She liked that. I mean, who wouldn’t? But then she was the one with the money, wasn’t she?”

  The last couple of sentences were rather unintelligible. Assad concentrated with his eyes squinched together as though he’d been surprised by a sudden sandstorm, but Carl had little difficulty picking out the words.

  “One more thing. Rita bought a packet of smokes on her debit card in Copenhagen the last day anyone saw her alive. Would you have any idea why she didn’t pay in cash? Bearing in mind the small amount.”

  Lone Rasmussen guffawed. “The taxman nailed her once with a hundred grand in a drawer at home. Came down hard on her, they did. She couldn’t explain where it came from, could she? After that, every penny went into the bank and she never made a cash withdrawal. Paid for everything with her Dankort or Diners. Course, a lot of shops didn’t accept plastic then, but if they didn’t, she’d just go elsewhere. No way she was going to make the same mistake again. And she never did.”

  “OK,” said Carl. So that was that sorted. “A shame you didn’t get any of her money,” he added, and almost meant it. Most likely it would have been the death of her, but at least she’d have gone out with a bang.

  “Well, I did get her furniture and all the stuff from the flat. Cats Protection didn’t want any of it, and all I had was cheap rubbish.”

  He could imagine.

  They thanked her and concluded the call. They were welcome to get in touch again, she told them.