The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “Cheers, Carl,” said Ronny, with a smile. “Good to see you again.”

  “So I shouldn’t bank on getting my money back, then?”

  “Nope. But I can offer you the most delicious Tom Kha Gai you could ever wish for.”

  “Sounds like something poisonous.”

  The Thai woman chuckled again.

  “It’s a spicy chicken soup made with coconut milk, kaffir lime leaves, and galangal,” Ronny explained.

  “Listen here, Ronny,” Carl sighed. “You did me for six hundred and seventy kroner today, but we’ll let that go. It’ll be the last time you pull one over on me. Right now I’m up to my eyeballs in work, but our little chat today has got me rather concerned. Are you lining up to blackmail me, Ronny? Because if you are, I can guarantee your feet won’t touch before you and little Mae here are in front of a judge in the district court or on a plane back to Chow Mein City or wherever the fuck it is you like to hang out, do you get my drift?”

  The woman turned and began to berate Ronny in Thai. He shook his head a couple of times before his face suddenly became livid with rage. His bushy eyebrows seemed to take on a life of their own.

  Then he glared at Carl. “I’ve got two things to say to you. First, you were the one who came to me this morning, like I said. And second, my wife, Mae-Ying-Thahan Mørck, just struck you off the guest list.”

  • • •

  Less than a minute later he was out the door. Apparently Ronny’s diminutive spouse had found out that if she rattled her kitchen utensils loud enough, people tended to beat a hasty retreat.

  So our paths diverge again, Ronny, he said to himself, with a sneaking feeling that he might be wrong. He felt his mobile vibrate in his pocket and knew it was Mona before he saw the display.

  “Hi, gorgeous,” he said, trying to sound like he had a cold, though not enough to prevent him from taking up an invitation.

  “If you fancy giving it another try with my daughter and Ludwig, you can come round tomorrow,” she said.

  A rather reluctant peace offering, by the sound of it.

  “I’d love to,” he said, as if he meant it.

  “Good. Seven o’clock, then, at mine. And I ought to remind you you’ve got an appointment with Kris tomorrow afternoon at three, in his office. You’ve been there before, so you know where it is.”

  “Have I? Can’t say it rings a bell,” he said, lying through his teeth.

  “Yes, you have. And Carl? You need it. I know the signals.”

  “But I’ll be in Halsskov tomorrow.”

  “Not at three o’clock, you won’t!”

  “Mona, I’m doing fine. There isn’t the slightest bit of panic left in me after that nail-gun case, I can assure you.”

  “I spoke to Marcus Jacobsen about your hysterics in the briefing room today.”

  “Hysterics? What hysterics?”

  “Besides, I’d like to be sure the man I’m on the verge of selecting to be my regular lover is mentally up to the job.”

  Carl racked his brains to find the right rejoinder, only to sense all semblance of verbal dexterity slipping away. Expressing his feelings properly right now would mean resorting to tango steps, if he could.

  “The way things are looking, you’re in for a rough time, I’m afraid. Marcus has asked me to tell you there’s been a development. They’ve turned something else up in the box that body was buried in.”

  So much for ballroom dancing.

  “They found a piece of paper underneath the body. A xerox of a photograph, wrapped up in plastic. It shows the victim, this Pete Boswell, standing between you and Anker with his arms around your shoulders.”

  21

  November 2010

  “You’re looking tired, Carl. Perhaps I should do the driving?” Assad said the next morning.

  “I am tired, and no, you’re not doing the driving, Assad. Not as long as I’m with you, anyway.”

  “Were you unable to sleep?”

  Carl didn’t answer. He’d slept all right, albeit only for two hours. It had been a night of churning thoughts. The evening before, Marcus Jacobsen had e-mailed him the photo of the victim standing shoulder to shoulder with Carl and Anker, thereby confirming what Mona had told him earlier on.

  “We’ve got the lab looking into it to see if they can ascertain whether or not it’s a fake. I’m assuming we agree that would be the best outcome,” the chief had written.

  Understatement of the year. Of course it’d be best if they could conclude it was a fake, because it was a fake. Was Jacobsen angling for some kind of confession here?

  He’d never been anywhere near the deceased, didn’t even know him, and yet this was costing him precious fucking sleep. If forensics was unable to prove the photo had been manipulated, Carl could expect a suspension any day now. He knew as well as anyone how Marcus operated.

  He gazed out at the tailback of cars in front of them, working his jaw muscles. If he’d been thinking straight they’d have waited half an hour.

  “A lot of traffic on the road,” said Assad, ever observant.

  “Yeah, and if they don’t get their fucking arses moving, we won’t be in Halsskov before ten o’clock.”

  “We have the whole day ahead of us, Carl.”

  “No, we don’t. I’ve got to be back by three.”

  “Ah, in that case we should put this away,” he said, pointing at the GPS. “We can leave the motorway and be there in no time if I read the map for you, Carl.”

  It was a proposal that cost them another hour before they eventually turned into the driveway of Philip Nørvig’s house just as the eleven o’clock news started on the radio.

  “Demonstrators are gathering this morning outside the home of Curt Wad in Brøndby,” said the newsreader. “A protest action initiated by grass-roots organizations seeks to highlight what they refer to as the antidemocratic principles on which Dr. Wad’s Purity Party is founded. Curt Wad stated . . .”

  Carl switched off the engine and stepped out onto the gravel of the driveway.

  • • •

  “If it hadn’t been for Herbert . . .”

  Mie Nørvig nodded in the direction of the man who had just entered the living room to introduce himself. Like Mie, he seemed to be somewhere in his seventies.

  “. . . well, Cecilie and I would never have been able to keep the house on at all.”

  Carl greeted the man politely as he sat down.

  “I can well understand. It must have been a trying time indeed,” Carl said with a nod. Another understatement. Not only had her husband gone bust, he’d done a bunk on her and left her to sort out the mess herself.

  “I’ll be very direct, Mrs. Nørvig.” He hesitated, suddenly in doubt. “That is still your surname, isn’t it?”

  She rubbed the back of her hand nervously. The question was obviously an embarrassment. “Yes, it is. You see, Herbert and I aren’t married. The courts declared me bankrupt when Philip disappeared, so it wasn’t the sensible thing to do.”

  Carl forced a smile to show he understood, though he couldn’t have cared less whether they were married or not. “Is it conceivable your husband just couldn’t cope, and decided to put it all behind him?”

  “Not if you mean did he commit suicide. Philip was too much of a coward for that.” It sounded harsh, but maybe she would have preferred him to have taken a length of rope and hanged himself in one of the trees in the garden. Maybe it would have been better for her.

  “No, what I mean is whether he might simply have run away from it all. Perhaps he managed to put some money aside and then settled down somewhere abroad where no one would find him.”

  She looked at him with surprise. Had the thought never occurred to her?

  “Impossible. Philip hated traveling. Sometimes I used to pester him for us to go on a trip. Nothing special, ju
st a bus trip to Germany, that sort of thing. A couple of days at most. But he never would. He hated going anywhere new. Why else would he set up his practice in a dump like this? Because it’s where he grew up, that’s why!”

  “Perhaps he felt he had no option but to disappear, the way things stood with the business. A mountain village in Crete, maybe, or somewhere in Argentina. A place where a person running away from problems at home could settle down nicely with no questions asked.”

  Mie Nørvig snorted and shook her head. The idea was clearly unthinkable.

  The man she called Herbert broke in.

  “I’m sorry, but perhaps I ought to add at this point that Philip was an old schoolfriend of my elder brother. He always used to say Philip was a sissy.” He sent his partner a knowing look, most likely to reinforce his position as a considerably more appropriate match than his predecessor. “Once, when there was a school trip to Bornholm, Philip refused to go. He said he wouldn’t be able to understand a word of the local dialect, so there was no point. His teachers huffed and puffed, but he stuck to his guns. He wasn’t one to be forced into doing what didn’t suit him.”

  “Hmm. Doesn’t sound like what I’d call a sissy, but maybe you’re made of hardier stuff here. OK, let’s put that theory aside for the time being. It wasn’t suicide, and he didn’t settle abroad. Which means we’re left with an accident, manslaughter, or murder. Which do you reckon would be most likely?”

  “In my opinion it was that damned organization he belonged to that killed him,” Mie Nørvig said, looking at Assad.

  Carl glanced at his assistant, whose dark eyebrows had suddenly relocated to the northern extremity of his corrugated brow.

  “Come now, Mie,” said Herbert, from the sofa. “We don’t know that.”

  Carl fixed his gaze on the elderly woman. “I’m not sure I’m with you. What organization?” he asked. “There’s no mention in the case file of him belonging to any organization.”

  “I never mentioned it before.”

  “I see. Then perhaps you might put us in the picture?”

  “They called themselves The Cause.”

  Assad reached for his notepad.

  “The Cause? A bit melodramatic, isn’t it? Sounds like a Sherlock Holmes whodunnit.” He ventured a smile, but the information had triggered quite a different reaction inside him. “And what might this ‘Cause’ involve?” he asked.

  “Mie, I don’t think you ought to . . .” interrupted Herbert, but Mie Nørvig ignored him.

  “I don’t know much about it, to be honest, because Philip never mentioned it. Apparently he wasn’t allowed. But I couldn’t help but pick up little snippets through the years. I was his secretary, after all,” she said, dismissing her partner’s protest with a wave of her hand.

  “What sort of snippets?” Carl went on.

  “About some people deserving to have children and others not. Philip sometimes assisted in passing compulsory sterilizations through the system. He’d been doing it for some years before I began working for him. There was an old case they sometimes mentioned when Curt was here. I—”

  “Curt?” Carl interrupted.

  “Curt Wad. He’s in politics now.”

  Carl tried to place the vaguely familiar name and failed.

  “The Hermansen case, they called it,” the woman continued. “I think it must have been the first one they collaborated on. In later years Philip also served as a contact for doctors and other lawyers. There was a whole network he was in charge of.”

  “I see. But that sort of thing wasn’t unusual at the time, was it? I mean, why should your husband have been in danger on that account? The authorities must have allowed the sterilization of lots of mentally challenged individuals in the old days.”

  “Yes, but quite often they sterilized people who weren’t mentally challenged, and had them committed, too. It was the convenient thing to do if they wanted them out of the way. Gypsy women, for instance. And women with big families who relied on social benefits or else prostituted themselves. If The Cause could coax these women into the surgeries, they often came out again with their tubes tied, and certainly without the unborn children in their womb if they were pregnant.”

  “OK, let me get this straight. You’re saying that radical surgical operations were performed illegally on these women without their consent?”

  Mie Nørvig lifted her teaspoon and stirred her coffee, regardless that it was long since cold. That was her reply. They’d have to figure out the rest for themselves.

  “Does any information exist on this organization, The Cause? Dossiers, reports of any kind?”

  “Not as such, no. But I do have Philip’s files and newspaper cuttings in the basement where he had his office.”

  “Honestly, Mie, do you think this is wise? Will it help matters?” Herbert inquired. “What I mean is, aren’t we better off letting sleeping dogs lie?”

  Mie Nørvig didn’t answer him.

  And then Assad raised his hand in the air, slowly and with a pained expression on his face. “Excuse me, may I use the toilet, please?”

  • • •

  Carl didn’t care much for rummaging through piles of documents. He had staff for that. But with one answering a call of nature and the other holding the fort back at HQ, he didn’t have much choice.

  “Where should we start?” he asked Mie Nørvig, who stood gazing around the basement office as if she were a stranger in her own home.

  Carl gave a sigh as she pulled out a couple of drawers from a filing cabinet to reveal a seemingly endless series of suspension files, all stuffed to bursting point. Poring through all this lot looked like it would take forever. Definitely something he could do without.

  Mie Nørvig shrugged. “I haven’t concerned myself with any of this for a great many years. I don’t like to come down here since Philip disappeared. I’ve thought of just getting rid of it all, of course, but these are all confidential documents that need to be disposed of in the proper manner. It’d be such a bother. Much easier to lock the door and forget all about it. It’s not as if we need the space.” She paused and stared vacantly around the room once more.

  “It’s a daunting task, I must say,” Herbert ventured. “Perhaps Mie and I ought to sift through and see if there’s anything that might be of interest to you. If anything turns up we could pass it on. Would that be all right? Of course, we’d need to know what we were looking for first.”

  “Oh, I know,” Mie Nørvig exclaimed suddenly, indicating a large roll-front cabinet of light-colored wood, on top of which were cardboard boxes heavy with preprinted envelopes, business cards, and an assortment of forms.

  She turned the key and the roll-front descended promptly like a guillotine.

  “There,” she said, picking out a blue spiral scrapbook in A3 format. “Philip’s first wife kept it. After 1973, when Philip and Sara Julie were divorced, the cuttings were no longer stuck in, just placed between the pages.”

  “You’ve been through it, I take it?”

  “Certainly. After Sara Julie, I was the one who put the articles in that Philip asked me to cut out of the papers.”

  “And what was it you wanted to show me?” Carl asked, noting that Assad had now entered the room, no longer paler than was healthy-looking for the average Arab. Maybe he was in better fettle now he’d been for a groaner.

  “You all right, Assad?” he asked.

  “Just a minor relapse, Carl.” He patted himself cautiously on the stomach, hinting that his peristaltic woes might not be over.

  “Here,” said Mie Nørvig. “A cutting from 1980. And there’s the person I was telling you about,” she went on, pointing at the article. “Curt Wad. I couldn’t stand the man. Whenever he’d been here, or whenever my husband spoke to him on the phone, it was as though Philip was a different person. He could become so callous. No, callous isn�
��t quite the word. More impassive, as though he had no feelings left inside him. All of a sudden he could be so cold toward my daughter and me, as though he’d taken on a completely different personality. Normally he was kind enough, but often when this happened we would argue.”

  Carl studied the article. Purity Party Sets Up Korsør Branch, the headline ran. Below it was a press photo. Philip Nørvig in a tweed jacket, the man at his side elegant in a dark suit, a tight knot in his tie.

  Philip Nørvig and Curt Wad led the meeting with authority, read the caption.

  “Well, fuck me,” Carl muttered, glancing apologetically in the direction of his hosts. “This is the bloke who’s all over the news. The Purity Party, I recognize the name now.”

  The photo showed a rather younger version of the Curt Wad he’d seen on TV the day before. Jet-black sideburns, a tall, handsome man in his prime, and by his side a thin, wiry man with sharp creases in his trousers and a smile that seemed false and infrequently used.

  She nodded. “Yes, that’s him. Curt Wad.”

  “He’s trying to get this Purity Party into parliament at the moment, is that right?”

  She nodded again. “It’s not the first time, not by a long way. But this time it seems he might succeed, perish the thought. Curt Wad is a man with a lot of influence and no scruples, and his ideas are sick. One can only hope they’re given short shrift.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mie,” said Herbert, interrupting again.

  Officious git, Carl thought to himself.

  “Oh, but I do,” Mie Nørvig replied with some annoyance. “And you know fine well I do! You’ve kept up with the papers just as much as I have. Think of what that Louis Petterson was writing at one point; we’ve talked about it. Curt Wad and all his yes-men have been in the thick of all sorts of dreadful cases, abortions he referred to as necessary curettages, and sterilizations. Interventions the women didn’t even know they’d been subjected to.”

  Herbert protested more emotionally than seemed called for. “My wife . . . Mie, that is, has got it into her head that Wad is to blame for Philip’s disappearance. Grief can be a terrible thing, and . . .”