The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  He wrenched himself free and marched off down the corridor.

  Lis gave Carl a look of equal parts sympathy and concern. “Don’t worry about your car, Carl. Soon have it sorted for you,” she said.

  Word spread like the clap with its arse on fire here.

  “Still nothing from Assad?”

  Rose shook her head. She definitely looked worried now.

  “How come you’re so bothered about him all of a sudden, anyway?”

  “Because I’ve seen him rattled a couple of times recently. Never seen that before.”

  Carl knew what she meant. She didn’t miss a trick.

  “We’ve been told to get Nørvig’s archives up to the third floor.”

  “Better get a move on, then, hadn’t you?”

  Carl dropped his head slightly so his circulation didn’t grind to a halt. “What are you so pissed off about, Rose?”

  “Don’t worry yourself,” she replied. “You haven’t got time for all that”—finger quotes—“‘Love Thy Neighbor’ stuff. You said so yourself.”

  He struggled to hold back his temper, then calmly managed to inform her that if she didn’t get her backside into gear and start lugging those fucking files, he’d tell her to go home and send for Yrsa instead.

  And he meant it, too.

  Rose frowned. “Do you know what, Carl? I don’t think you’re right in the head.”

  He heard her making a racket as he called Assad’s number several times in succession, legs jiggling with tension underneath the desk. Assad had half-inched his lighter, and if he didn’t have a smoke in a minute his calf muscles were going to cramp up.

  “Be seeing you,” came the shrill sound of Rose’s voice from the corridor. Carl turned to the doorway just in time to see her stride past with her overcoat on and her pink bag slung over her shoulder.

  So that was that.

  Bollocks! Was she really sodding off? He almost burst into tears at the thought of the consequences. She’d be sending her alter ego, Yrsa, in the morning. At best.

  His mobile thrummed and twirled on the desk. It was Lis.

  “OK, I’ve got your car sorted. If you go to the parking lot over by the National Investigation Center, I’ll send someone along with the keys.”

  Carl nodded. About fucking time. All he had to do now was find Assad. Rose had got him worked up about it now.

  Two minutes later he was standing in the parking lot, looking around in vain. No car, no minion with a key. He frowned and was just about to call Lis when a pair of headlights blinked at him at the far end of the lot.

  He went over and discovered Rose with her fluorescent bag on her lap, seated in the passenger seat of a car smaller than his trouser pocket. He swallowed hard as he tried to digest his horror. The color of the vehicle was enough on its own. It reminded him of the hunk of Danish Blue he’d put in the fridge a couple of months back and forgotten all about.

  “What the fuck’s this, and what are you doing in it, Rose?” he spluttered as he opened the door on the driver’s side.

  “It’s a Ford Ka and you’re on your way to find Assad, right?”

  He nodded. You had to hand it to the gangly goth. Her intuition was spot-on.

  “Well, I’m going with you. And this is the car Marcus Jacobsen’s leased for you for the rest of the year.” She managed to stifle a giggle, then became serious again. “Come on, Carl. It’ll be dark soon.”

  • • •

  They got down on their knees, one after the other, and peered through the letter box of the flat on Heimdalsgade, and as Carl expected they saw neither furniture nor any sign of Assad.

  The last time Carl had been here he’d been confronted by a pair of painstakingly tattooed brothers with foreign names and biceps as big as coconuts. This time he had to make do with the general clamor of domestic disputes in languages that might just as easily have been Serbo-Croat as Somali. It was what they called a lively neighborhood.

  “He’s been living in a house out on Kongevejen for quite a while now. Don’t ask me to explain,” said Carl, as he climbed back into their mobile hatbox.

  They drove for fifteen minutes without a word, until eventually they stood before a whitewashed cottage that seemed almost to have merged into the woods where the road to Bistrup opened out onto Kongevejen.

  “Doesn’t look like he’s here either, Carl,” said Rose. “Are you sure this is the right address?”

  “It’s the one he gave me, anyway.”

  They stared at the nameplate. On it were two archetypal Danish women’s names. Maybe they’d sublet the place to Assad. With the property market bottomed out, everyone knew someone these days who’d suddenly found themselves stuck with two homes on their hands and a pressing need for cash. The heady days of finance ministers using their bollocks for brains and banks lining their pockets at ordinary people’s expense weren’t over yet by a long chalk.

  A few moments later the ebullient dark-haired woman who had opened the door was assuring him that if this Assad chap he knew happened to be homeless, he would be welcome to stop on their sofa for a couple of nights for a modest sum. But apart from that, she and her partner had never heard of him.

  So there they were.

  “Don’t you know where your own workers live?” Rose asked scathingly as they got back in the car. “I thought you ran Assad home every now and then, knowing how nosy you are and all.”

  Carl considered the affront for a moment before hitting back. “OK, little Miss Know-It-All. What do you know about Assad’s domestic life?”

  She gazed through the windshield, eyes unfocused. “Not a lot. He used to mention his wife and his two daughters occasionally, but that’s a while back now. To be quite honest, I don’t think he lives with them anymore.”

  Carl nodded pensively. The thought had occurred to him, too. “What about friends? Has he ever mentioned any? Maybe he’s holed up with one of them.”

  She shook her head. “You probably think I’m daft now, but something tells me Assad hasn’t got a home.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I’ve this feeling he’s been sleeping at work for a while. I think he might even go out for a couple of hours at night just to make it look right. But it’s not like we clock in or anything, is it? So it’s hard to know for sure.”

  “What about his clothes? He’s not in the same gear every day, is he? So he must have a base somewhere.”

  “I suppose we could check his cupboards and drawers at HQ. Perhaps he keeps all his stuff there. He can get his laundry done in town. Come to think of it, he does come in toting plastic bags every now and then. I always just thought it was all those funny snacks he gets in from the immigrant stores.”

  Carl sighed. Whatever Assad’s plastic bags contained, it was no help to them now.

  “He’s probably just gone off on his own to let off steam. You’ll see, he’s more than likely back at the office now. Give him a call, will you, Rose?”

  She raised her eyebrows. The usual why-don’t-you-do-it-yourself. But then she got her phone out and did it anyway.

  “Did you know he has voicemail on that new phone of his, Carl?” she asked, ear pressed to her mobile. “He’s got a greeting set up and everything.”

  He shook his head. “What’s it say?”

  “It says he’s out of the office on police business, but he’ll be back by six.”

  “And what time is it now?”

  “Almost seven.”

  Carl picked up his own phone and called the duty desk at HQ.

  They’d seen neither hide nor hair of him.

  “Police business,” Assad’s message had said. It was odd.

  Rose hung up and stroked her chin for a moment.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Carl? I wouldn’t put it past him, the mood he was in.�
�

  Carl sat a while, squinting at the headlights flashing by on the busy road.

  “I’m afraid you might be right.”

  • • •

  They left the dwarfmobile on Tværgaden, across from the police academy. Curt Wad’s house was twenty-five meters farther along, at the end of what was a rather pleasant street. As far as they could see from a distance, the house was dark behind the high wooden fence.

  “Not exactly promising,” said Carl.

  “We don’t know yet,” Rose replied. “I’m just glad we’ve got weapons with us, because my intuition’s got all its alarms going off here.”

  Carl patted his service pistol. “Well, I feel equipped. What have you got in your bag?”

  He gestured toward the voluminous pink monstrosity Rose had almost certainly nicked off her real sister Yrsa.

  She said nothing. Instead, she swung the bag once above her head, bringing it down with an almighty whack against the green garbage bin one of the residents had put out on the pavement.

  When they saw the extent of the damage to the bin, which now lay halfway up the man’s driveway with a train of rubbish scattered in its wake, they immediately turned and legged it. Before the light came on at the front door they were already out of sight.

  “What the fuck have you got in there, Rose? Boulders?” Carl spluttered breathlessly as they stopped in front of Curt Wad’s driveway on Brøndbyøstervej.

  “The collected works of Shakespeare. Bound in leather.”

  • • •

  A minute later Carl stood in Wad’s garden for the second time that day, peering in at the living-room window, this time with Rose stationed at an appropriate distance, eyes scanning the dark.

  It had been a long time since she’d been with them in the field, and she seemed jumpy in the pitch-blackness. Even the stars in the sky looked like they’d jacked it in for the night.

  Carl went over and tried the back door. It was locked, but the frame didn’t look in the best of shape. He wondered what Assad would have done now, then heaved at the door with such force that the frame gave way audibly.

  He gripped the stainless-steel doorknob more firmly, took a couple of deep breaths to muster strength, and placed one foot against the brickwork before yanking so hard he immediately felt something give in his shoulder. He tumbled backward over the doorstep, ending up on his backside in the grass with the doorknob in his hand and a pain down one side.

  “Nice work,” said Rose, noting that while the door and the lock had remained intact, the pane had cracked, one long fracture running lengthwise and what looked like a thousand little tributaries.

  She lifted a foot and pressed the sole of her boot gently against the glass.

  There was a clatter as the pane dislodged into the room inside. Carl counted the seconds, hoping Assad had been right in his observation about the place not being alarmed. He certainly didn’t fancy trying to explain to a pair of security guards that the sirens had gone off when the door suddenly fell apart on its own.

  “How come there’s no alarm?” Rose whispered. “There’s a doctor’s surgery on the premises.”

  “There will be in that part of the house, believe me,” Carl whispered back.

  What they were doing seemed ridiculous. Why break into a house when Assad so obviously wasn’t there? Was this his female intuition trying to kick in? Or was he now driven by his desire to give this degenerate old man a taste of his own bitter medicine?

  “What now, Carl?” Rose whispered.

  “I want to see what’s upstairs. I’ve got a feeling we’ll find something there, maybe something that can confirm his involvement in what happened at my place. Wad tried to tell us his wife was on her deathbed. But wouldn’t he be here now if he were telling the truth? I mean, who’s going to leave their dying wife all alone in an empty house? No, I reckon he’s hiding something up there. Gut feeling.”

  Carl switched on his flashlight, illuminating their way through the dining room and the hallway, where a floral blind pulled down over the window by the front door prevented anyone from looking in. He tried the door of the surgery. It was solid, just as he’d thought, probably reinforced with steel and protected by all manner of alarms that would go off the second it was opened by anyone unauthorized.

  He looked up the stairway, with its corner cupboard on the landing, rounded teak banisters, and gray carpeting. He was upstairs in an instant.

  The first floor wasn’t quite as presentable as below. A long, dark corridor with built-in cupboards and rooms that seemed like they’d only recently been vacated by the children who had lived there: ancient idol posters on the sloping walls and cheap floral-patterned sofa beds.

  And then he saw a dim light seeping from under a door at the far end. He turned off the flashlight and took hold of Rose’s arm.

  “Curt Wad may be in there, though he probably isn’t,” he whispered, so close to Rose’s ear that his lips touched it. “If he was, he’d have come down as soon as we smashed the window, but you never know. Maybe he’s the kind who prefers to lie in wait with a shotgun. That’d be more his style, come to think of it. Get behind me and be ready to hit the deck.”

  “If he’s there, and he’s not armed, how are you going to explain what we’re doing here?”

  “I’ll say we got an emergency call,” Carl whispered back, hoping he wouldn’t have to repeat the excuse to Marcus Jacobsen at some later point.

  He stepped up to the teak-veneered door and held his breath for a second, his hand sliding toward his pistol.

  He counted to three in his head, then kicked open the door with one foot, spinning back to safety behind the wall on the other.

  “Police, Wad. We received an emergency call . . . ,” he began, keeping his voice as subdued as possible, then noticing the light flicker as though it came from a candle.

  He leaned forward with caution and peeped into the room, sensing immediately how stupid a move it was, only to discover a small female figure laid out on the bedspread. The head was exposed, a white sheet covering the body and a withered bouquet of flowers placed between the folded hands. She was illuminated only by the candle her devoted husband had placed by the bed.

  Rose stepped inside. Everything was silent. Such was death.

  They stood staring at the deceased for a moment, and then Rose let out a faint sigh. “I’d say that was her bridal bouquet, Carl,” she said.

  Carl swallowed twice.

  • • •

  “Come on, let’s get out of here, Rose. What we just did was the height of stupidity,” said Carl as they came back out into the garden and stood for a second at the wrecked door. He picked up the metal doorknob from where he’d dropped it on the lawn, wiping it thoroughly with his handkerchief before tossing it back onto the ground. “I hope you haven’t had your fingers all over the place in there,” he said.

  “Of course I haven’t. I was too busy thinking about getting a good swing in with my bag if you got shot to pieces,” she replied. How considerate of her.

  “Give me the flashlight,” she commanded. “I hate tagging along behind. Can’t see a thing.”

  She waved it about like an excited schoolboy engaged in nocturnal antics, so nobody for miles around would be in the slightest doubt that a break-in might be going on. Carl hoped the bloke with the garbage bin wasn’t still on the prowl.

  “Keep the beam on the ground, Rose,” he instructed.

  She did as she was told.

  And then she stopped in her tracks.

  The spot of blood in the grass wasn’t big, but it was there. She shone the flashlight around the area, finding a second patch in the driveway. And then a trail of drips, almost unnoticeable, leading to the outbuilding.

  Carl’s gut feeling returned at full force. An unpleasant knot in his stomach.

  If only they’d seen this before t
hey broke in, he would have called for assistance. Now things weren’t quite as straightforward.

  He pondered for a second.

  Maybe they’d get away with it anyway. They had seen enough on the premises to indicate something suspicious might be going on. Surely that would be to their advantage? And who was to say they were responsible for breaking in? They certainly didn’t have to tell anyone.

  “I’m going to call this in to Glostrup,” he said. “We could do with making it more official.”

  “Didn’t you say Marcus Jacobsen told you to stay away from Curt Wad?” Rose asked, the beam of her flashlight sweeping between the three doors of the outbuilding.

  “That’s true.”

  “So what are you doing here at his house?”

  “You’re right, but I’m going to call Glostrup anyway,” he replied, pulling his mobile out of his pocket. The Glostrup lads would be able to tell him what car Curt Wad owned and could put out an alert right away. Maybe Wad’s car was out there somewhere with an injured person in the boot, and that person might be Assad. Carl’s imagination was running riot.

  “Wait,” said Rose suddenly. “Look!”

  She shone the flashlight on the padlock that hung from the middle door of the old stables. A regular padlock of the sort you could get for ten kroner in Netto. Only this one, if examined closely, had two marks on it that could only be fingerprints.

  She rubbed some spit on them, then sucked her finger.

  It tasted of blood.

  Carl looked closer at the lock, then took his pistol from its holster. The easiest course would have been to blow it to pieces, but Carl opted for the less dramatic solution, hammering the butt of his weapon down on the padlock until his fingers throbbed with pain.

  Rose gave him a rare pat of approval when finally it gave way.

  “It won’t make much difference now,” she said, feeling around for a light switch inside the door.

  They blinked a couple of times as the flickering fluorescent light revealed a room that could have belonged to almost any outhouse in the town where Carl grew up. Shelves along one wall, with flower pots on them, discarded pans and receptacles, and wizened flower bulbs that hadn’t seen soil for years. Against the other wall was a humming deep freezer, in front of it a steel ladder leading up through a trapdoor to a loft where Carl could see a dimly illuminating naked lightbulb, 25 watts at most.