The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Carl nodded. It’d give her something to talk about.

  Rose scrutinized their expressions and could tell she’d got them interested. There was substance to this, a case that cried out for fresh investigation.

  “OK, what else have you got, Rose?” Carl asked. “Out with it.”

  “You don’t know much about Madonna, do you, Carl?”

  He looked at her wearily for a moment. In the eyes of someone like Rose, who had been a part of this world a good many years less than himself, it seemed that anyone over thirty had already descended into a rut, while being over forty meant never having been young at all. He shuddered to think how eyes like hers perceived a person who was fifty, sixty, or more.

  He shrugged. Despite his advanced age he of course knew quite a lot about Madonna. But Rose didn’t need to know how one of his former girlfriends had driven him up the wall with “Material Girl,” or how Vigga had danced in the nude for him, writhing her hips sensually as she wailed the words to “Papa Don’t Preach.” It wasn’t the kind of performance he felt inclined to share with anyone.

  “What’s there to know?” he said. “Hasn’t she gone religious these days?”

  Rose was far from impressed. “Rita Nielsen set up her call-girl business and massage parlor in Kolding in 1983. She called herself Louise Ciccone on the local porn scene. Doesn’t that ring a bell?”

  Assad raised a tentative finger in the air. “Ciccone is a kind of pasta, I think, with meat inside. Very nice.”

  She glared at him, indignant. “Madonna’s real name is Madonna Louise Ciccone. Lone Rasmussen told me they played her records all the time in the massage parlor, nothing else would do, and Rita was always trying to copy Madonna’s makeup and hair. At the time she disappeared she had the same Marilyn Monroe peroxide job Madonna sported on her Who’s That Girl tour. See for yourselves!”

  She clicked an image onto her computer screen. A provocative photo of Madonna in fishnets, black corset, and unmistakable eighties makeup, with dark eyebrows and fluffy blonde hair, mike in hand and her arm dangling limply at her side. Carl remembered it well, like it was yesterday. Only it wasn’t.

  “That’s exactly how she looked, Lone Rasmussen told me. Dark eyeshadow and bloodred lips, the works. This is Rita Nielsen the day she disappeared. Older, perhaps, but still a bit of a stunner, apparently.”

  “My goodness,” said Assad, master of the succinct.

  “I checked out the contents of Rita’s glove compartment,” Rose continued. “All Madonna’s LPs on cassette. Including the sound track of Who’s That Girl, though the tape was missing. Most likely it was in the cassette player that got nicked. And then there were the brochures about Florence, and the guidebook of northern Italy. It got me wondering if it all might fit together. Have a look at this.”

  She clicked an icon on the desktop and the same image of Madonna came up. Exactly the same, apart from a series of dates listed down one side of the page. Rose pointed at them.

  “June the fourteenth and fifteenth, Nashinomiya Stadium, Osaka, Japan,” Assad read out loud. It couldn’t have sounded less Japanese. Absolutely abominable.

  “The stadium’s actually called Nishinomiya, according to all my other sources, but who’s counting,” said Rose, a ring of superiority passing through black-painted lips. “But look at the bottom of the list and you’ll be in for a surprise.”

  Carl heard Assad read out loud again. “September the sixth, Stadio Comunale, Florence, Italy.”

  “OK,” said Carl. “Let me guess what year we’re talking about here: 1987, by any chance?”

  Rose nodded vigorously. Now she was in high gear. “The same Sunday Rita Nielsen had crossed out in her calendar. If you ask me, she was going to the last concert on Madonna’s world tour. I’m positive. Rita wanted to get home from Copenhagen as quickly as possible so she could pack her things and get off to Florence to see her idol.”

  Assad and Carl exchanged glances. The brochures, the pet-sitting, the Madonna obsession. It all matched up.

  “Any way of checking if she booked a flight from Billund that day?”

  Rose gave him a look of disappointment. “I’ve already done that, and their system doesn’t go back that far. They didn’t find anything in the flat either, so we’ll have to assume she had the tickets for the flight and the concert with her when she disappeared.”

  “In which case it’s hardly likely to be suicide,” Carl concluded, and gave Rose a very gentle pat on the shoulder.

  • • •

  Carl read through Rose’s notes on Rita Nielsen. Checking Rita’s merits seemed to have been a relatively straightforward matter, for since childhood she had been under the watchful eye of vigilant public authorities. They’d all been involved at some point. Child welfare and the psychiatric services, the police, hospitals, and the prison system. Born 1 April 1935, to a prostitute mother who went on working the streets while Rita was brought up by family at the arse-end of the social scale. Caught shoplifting at five, minor crime throughout her six-year education. Approved school, children’s home, more crime. Prostituted herself for the first time at age fifteen, pregnant at seventeen, abortion, then a period under observation for social deviance and subnormal intelligence. The family had disintegrated long before.

  After a time in foster care came more prostitution, followed by a spell at the Keller Mental Asylum in Brejning where she was diagnosed as subnormal. Repeated attempts to abscond and episodes of violence led to several terms at the Women’s Home on the island of Sprogø in the years 1955–61. There was another placement in a foster home and more crime, after which she disappeared from the system for a period extending from the summer of 1963 to the mid-1970s, when she seemed to have been earning a living as a dancer in various cities throughout Europe.

  Next she set up a massage parlor in Aalborg, and was later convicted of procuring. After that, her social problems seemed to come to an end. Apparently she’d learned her lesson and managed to accumulate a considerable amount of money running a brothel and escort service without interference from the authorities. She paid her taxes and left liquid assets amounting to three and a half million kroner, the equivalent of at least ten million in today’s money.

  Carl mused as he read. If Rita Nielsen had been mentally challenged, he knew quite a few others who were, too.

  It was then that he leaned his elbow into something wet on his desk and realized his nose had been running. There was enough to fill a cup.

  “Bollocks,” he exclaimed, throwing his head back and fumbling for something to use as a handkerchief.

  Two minutes later he was out in the corridor, interrupting Rose and Assad as they fastened copies of Rita’s case documents to the smaller of their two expansive bulletin boards.

  Carl glanced at the other board, a composite of soft particleboard panels extending from the door of Assad’s cubbyhole all the way to Rose’s office. On it was affixed one sheet of paper for each of the unsolved cases that had come in since Department Q had been set up. Arranged chronologically, several of them were joined by colored string to indicate a possible connection. The system was Assad’s, and it was simple. Blue string matched up cases Assad felt had something in common; red string joined those in which a connection had actually been established.

  At the moment they had a couple of blues, but no reds.

  There was no doubt this was a state of affairs Assad intended to do something about.

  Carl ran his eyes over the cases. There were at least a hundred sheets of paper now. No doubt much of it was rubbish that didn’t belong. It was like finding a needle and a thread in a haystack, and then trying to thread the needle blindfolded.

  “Right, I’m off home,” he said. “If I’m not mistaken, I’m coming down with the dreaded lurgy like you, Assad. If either of you are planning on hanging around for a while I’d suggest getting hold of the newspapers from the
time Rita Nielsen disappeared. Try from the week leading up to the fourth of September and as far as the fifteenth. It’ll give us some idea of what was going on at the time. Buggered if I can remember.”

  Rose planted her hands on her hips. “Like we’re just going to fall over something they overlooked in all that painstaking police work?”

  She said “painstaking.” An odd word, Carl thought, for someone of such relative youth.

  “Whatever,” he rejoined. “I’ve got some shut-eye and a goose to be thinking about.” And then he turned and was gone.

  9

  August 1987

  Nete’s mother always told her she had good hands. In her view there was no doubt whatsoever that Nete would one day be appreciated for the work they could do. Apart from having a good head on one’s shoulders, small, diligent hands were the most important tool God could give a person, and her father reaped the benefits of her gift after the death of his wife.

  When fence posts collapsed it was Nete who put them up again. Nete caulked the feeding troughs when the wood began to rot. She nailed things together and broke them apart when the time came.

  And these same able hands were to be her curse during her time on the island of Sprogø. Scratched until they bled when the scrub encroached upon the fields. Laboring all through the day with nothing in return. Nothing good, at least.

  Then came better years when they were left in peace. But now they were to be put to use again.

  • • •

  She measured up the back room at the end of the hallway with the same tape measure she used in her sewing, precisely charting its height, width, and length. The window alcoves and the door were subtracted from the total surface area, and then she wrote up her order. Tools, paint, filler, silicone sealant, laths, nails, rolls of plastic sheeting, weather stripping, mineral wool, floorboards, and plasterboard enough for two layers.

  The timber outlet on Ryesgade promised delivery the next day. It suited her well, for circumstances demanded she wait no longer.

  And when everything had been brought up into the apartment, the room was insulated and the joinery completed during the day while her downstairs neighbor was at work and the woman in the adjoining apartment was out shopping or traipsing round the city lakes with her little Tibetan rug pisser of a Lhasa apso.

  No one was to hear what was going on in the flat to the left on the fourth floor. No one was to see her with a hammer or a saw. No one was to appear with prying questions, for she had lived anonymously in the apartment for two years now and intended to go on doing so until the end of her days.

  No matter what else she was planning.

  • • •

  When the room was finished she stood in the doorway and admired her work. The ceiling had been the difficult part to insulate and clad, but also the most important along with the door and the floor, which she had raised and insulated with two layers of plastic sheeting and thick slabs of mineral wool. Then she had adjusted the door so it could still be opened inward, even though she had laid carpet over the new flooring.

  Apart from the difference in floor level compared with the hallway, there was absolutely nothing that called attention to itself. The room was ready. Joins filled, walls and ceiling painted, chunky weather stripping around the doors and windows. The furnishings were arranged exactly as before: the same pictures on the walls, the same knickknacks on the windowsills, and of course the dining table in the middle with its lace tablecloth and six chairs. Her own chair, the one with the armrests, she placed at the head of the table.

  She turned to the plant in the window and rubbed one of its leaves gently between her fingers. The smell was pungent, though not unpleasant. It was this smell of henbane that made her feel safe.

  • • •

  All the girls of Sprogø whispered about Gitte Charles when she arrived with the mail boat in the summer of 1956. Some said she was a trained nurse, but it wasn’t at all true. An auxiliary, perhaps, but not fully qualified, for besides the matron, none of the staff on the island had any formal training whatsoever. But Nete already knew that.

  The new arrival caused a stir, and the reason was the girls now had something pretty to look at. Swinging her arms coquettishly, striding along with a gait some said reminded them of Greta Garbo, Gitte Charles was in a league of her own. Nothing at all like the other miserable old crones who were either spinsters, divorcees, or widows, and for that reason had felt obliged to seek employment in this diabolical place.

  Gitte Charles carried herself proudly. She was blonde like Nete, her hair alluringly put up in a fashion not even the matron allowed herself. Feminine and with a spring in her step, the kind of woman Nete and many of the others dreamed of becoming.

  The girls cast envious, in some cases libidinous, glances in the direction of Gitte Charles, but soon they discovered that behind the delicate exterior, a demon lurked. And apart from Rita, they kept their distance.

  When Charles, as they called her, grew weary of Rita’s company, she turned her blue eyes on Nete, promising to ease her daily burdens, offering security and perhaps even the chance of getting away from the island altogether.

  It all depended on how nice Nete was to Charles. And Charles let her know that should Nete ever happen to let the cat out of the bag as to what the two of them had together, she would do well never to drink anything ever again if she wanted to go on living. Because who knew if there might be henbane in her cup?

  With this abominable threat, Charles introduced Nete to henbane and its ghastly properties.

  “Hyoscyamus niger,” she said, dramatically and deliberately, so as to emphasize the gravity of the matter. The name alone made Nete shudder.

  “They say witches used it for their flying ointment,” Charles went on. “And when they were caught, the priests and persecutors used the same plant to dull the witches’ senses during their torture. “Witches’ Herb,” they called it, so a person should be cautious indeed. Perhaps it would be better to do as I say, don’t you think?”

  Nete came to heel and remained there for months, and the time was in every way her worst on Sprogø.

  When Nete looked out over the sea she saw waves that could not only carry her away from the island to freedom, but also pull her down. Down into the darkness where no one would ever find her or do her harm again.

  • • •

  The seeds of the henbane plant were the only thing Nete took with her from Sprogø when she finally left the island. Nothing more, after four years of toil and torment.

  Much later, after qualifying as a laboratory assistant, she heard of monastery excavations where centuries-old henbane seed had been activated, and immediately she planted her own seeds in a pot and set it in a sunny spot.

  Presently a healthy green plant appeared like a reincarnation to greet her, as if it were an old friend who’d been gone a long time and had now returned.

  For some years it had flourished in the soil of Havngaard, and the plant that now stood in the window of her Nørrebro apartment was directly descended from those original seeds. She had dried the plants and stored them with the clothes she wore on the day she finally returned to freedom. They were relics of a bygone age. Leaves, seed capsules, desiccated stalks, and the moistureless remnants of what had once been the loveliest white flowers with dark veins and a gleaming red eye in the middle. She had gathered two bags of the plant’s various parts and knew exactly how to use them.

  Perhaps it had been henbane and its unrevealed secrets that had prompted Nete to continue her studies and become a biology lab technician. Perhaps it was what made her immerse herself in chemistry.

  Whatever the reason, with her upgraded knowledge of substances and their effects on the human body she was more able to comprehend what a singularly lethal implement nature had allowed to grow so freely in Sprogø’s earth.

  After a few experiments she succeeded in producin
g extracts of the three most important active ingredients of the plant in her kitchen on the fourth floor, and she tested the results on herself in tiny, mild doses.

  The hyoscyamine made her constipated and dried up her saliva; small bumps appeared on her face and in her mouth, and her heart became strangely arrhythmic, without actually making her ill.

  She feared the scopolamine more. She knew just fifty milligrams was a lethal dose. Even in the smallest amounts, scopolamine was highly soporific and at the same time a euphoriant. No wonder it had been used as a truth serum during World War II. A person with scopolamine in their blood became oblivious to whatever they might say in the dreamy, somnolent state the substance induced.

  And then there was the atropine, a colorless crystalline alkaloid found in all plants of the nightshade family. Maybe Nete hadn’t been as careful ingesting this as she had with the two other substances. In any case, it impaired both her vision and her ability to speak, caused a fever and flushes, made her skin burn, and gave her hallucinations that very nearly delivered her into unconsciousness.

  There was little doubt that a cocktail of these three ingredients would be lethal if sufficiently concentrated. Nete knew what would happen if she heated them up together and boiled away ninety-five percent of the water.

  Thus, she now held a sizable bottle of henbane extract in her hands, with all the windows steamed up and the air inside the apartment heavy with its bitter smell.

  All that remained was to find the right dosage for the right body.

  • • •

  Nete had not used her husband’s computer since she moved in. Why should she? There was no one to write to, nothing to write about, no accounts to be kept, no business correspondence to conduct. No spread-sheets or word processing. Those days were gone.

  But that Thursday in August 1987 she switched on the computer and listened to its whirring as the screen slowly became green. A tingling sensation ran through her body, and her stomach knotted with apprehension.