The Keeper of Lost Causes

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “Why was Annelise Kvist walking through the park? Why wasn’t she riding her bicycle? Where was she coming from?” asked one of the new team members. He didn’t know that he was supposed to wait until afterward to ask questions if Bak was running the meeting.

  Bak replied with an annoyed look. “She’d been visiting a woman friend, and her bicycle had a flat tire. That’s why she was pushing it through the park. We know that it must have been the perpetrator she saw because there were only two sets of footprints around the crime scene. We put great effort into investigating Annelise Kvist to find any weak points in her background. Anything that might explain her behavior when we began questioning her. We now know that she was once part of a biker gang, but we’re also relatively sure that we’re not going to find the killer in that environment.

  “The victim was the brother of Carlo Brandt, one of the most active bikers in the Valby area, and was absolutely in ‘good standing,’ even though he did sell drugs once in a while on his own. We now also know from this Carlo Brandt that the victim was a friend of Annelise Kvist, and at some point they were apparently on intimate terms. We’re looking into that now. At any rate, we’ve reached the conclusion that there is every indication she knew both the murderer and the victim.

  “As for what frightened the witness, her mother admitted to us that Annelise has previously been subjected to physical violence. Granted it was on a milder scale, involving being punched and threatened and the like, but it had a profound effect on Annelise. The mother thinks that her daughter has only herself to blame for all of this because she spends a lot of time in bars and isn’t very particular about who she brings home. But as far as we can tell, Annelise’s sexual and social habits aren’t much different from those of most other young women.

  “The discovery of the ear in Annelise’s toilet tells us that the killer knows who she is and where she lives, but as I’ve mentioned, we haven’t yet been able to convince her to tell us the name of the murderer.

  “The children have now been sent to stay with family members south of Copenhagen, and that has softened up Annelise a bit. There is no longer any doubt that she was under the influence of drugs at the time when she ostensibly tried to commit suicide. According to the tests, a stew of various euphoriants in pill form were found in her stomach.”

  Carl had kept his eyes closed during most of the session. The mere sight of Bak standing there and thrashing through things in that roundabout and tedious manner of his was enough to make his blood boil. He simply didn’t feel like looking at the man. And why should he? None of this had anything to do with him. His place was downstairs in the basement; that was what he needed to keep in mind. The homicide chief had summoned him up here to give him a pat on the back because he’d pushed the investigation a step further. That was all. He would spare them any opinions he might have in the future.

  “We haven’t found the pill bottle, so it’s possible the pills were provided in loose weight, presumably by the same perpetrator, and forced down her throat,” said Bak.

  So he’d figured that much out, at least.

  “All indications are that we’re talking about a failed murder attempt. The threats to kill her children made the witness stop talking,” Bak went on.

  At this point Marcus Jacobsen broke in. He could see that the new team members were itching to ask questions. Better to anticipate them.

  “Annelise Kvist and her mother and children will be given the witness protection that the case demands,” he said. “To start with, we’re going to move them to another location, and then I’m sure we’ll get her to talk. In the meantime we need to bring in the narcotics squad. I understand that a considerable amount of synthetic THC was found in her body, most likely Marinol, which is the most common kind of hash in pill form. We see it quite often in pusher circles, so let’s find out where it can be bought locally. I also understand that traces of crystal meth and ethylphenidate were found. An extremely unlikely cocktail.”

  Carl shook his head. The killer was certainly versatile. Slashing the throat of one victim in a park and then gently slipping pills down the throat of the other. Why couldn’t his colleagues just wait until the woman started spilling the beans on her own? He opened his eyes and found the homicide chief staring right at him.

  “You’re shaking your head, Carl. Do you have a better suggestion? Have you got some other creative ideas that might give us a lead?” He smiled. But he was the only one in the room who did.

  “All I know is that ingesting THC will make you throw up if too many other weird things are stuffed down your throat. So the guy who forced her to swallow the pills must have been really good at it, don’t you think? Why don’t you just wait until Annelise Kvist herself tells you what she saw? A couple of days, more or less, aren’t going to make any difference. And we’ve got other things to keep us busy.” He glanced around at his colleagues. “Well, at least I do.”

  The secretaries were busy, as usual. Lis sat at her computer wearing a headset and pounding on the keyboard like a drummer in a rock band. Carl looked for a new, dark-haired secretary, but no one fit Assad’s description. Only Lis’s colleague, the department’s infamous version of “Ilse, the She-Wolf ”—called Mrs. Sørensen by her coworkers—might reasonably be said to be a brunette. Carl squinted his eyes. Maybe Assad saw something in that surly face of hers that was invisible to everyone else.

  “We need a decent photocopier in the basement office, Lis,” said Carl, when she stopped drumming on the keyboard and gave him a big smile. “Could you make sure that happens by this afternoon? I know they have an extra one over in the National Investigative Center. It hasn’t even been taken out of the box.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, Carl,” she said. And he knew it would get done.

  “I need to speak to Marcus Jacobsen,” said a crisp voice next to him. Carl turned and found himself face to face with a woman he’d never seen before. She had brown eyes. The most insanely delicious brown eyes he’d ever seen. Carl felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. Then the woman turned to the secretaries.

  “Are you Mona Ibsen?” Mrs. Sørensen asked.

  “Yes,” the woman said.

  “We’ve been expecting you.”

  The two women smiled at each other, and Mona Ibsen stepped aside as Mrs. Sørensen got up to show her the way. Carl pressed his lips tight as he watched her disappear down the hall. She was wearing a short fur jacket, short enough so he could see the lower curves of her ass. Promising, but not a young woman, judging by her curves. Why the hell hadn’t he noticed anything about her face other than the eyes?

  “Mona Ibsen? Who’s that?” he asked Lis, trying to sound casual. “Something to do with the murder of the cyclist?”

  “No, she’s our new crisis counselor. A psychologist. As of today she’s assigned to work with all the departments here at headquarters.”

  “Is that right?” He could hear for himself how foolish he sounded.

  He suppressed the butterflies in his stomach and went over to Jacobsen’s office, opening the door without bothering to knock. If the boss was going to bawl him out, it damn well better be for a good cause.

  “Sorry, Marcus,” he said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

  She was sitting so that he saw her in profile, with soft skin and lines at the corners of her mouth, more the result of smiling than boredom.

  “I can come back later. Sorry for interrupting,” said Carl.

  She turned to face him as he uttered these words of cringing servility. She had a distinctive mouth. Full, Cupid’s-bow lips. She was clearly over fifty, and she gave him a faint smile. Damned if his kneecaps didn’t turn to jelly.

  “What do you want, Carl?” Marcus asked.

  “I just wanted to say that I think you should ask Annelise Kvist whether she also has a relationship with the killer.”

  “We did that, Carl. She doesn’t.”

  “No? Well, then I think you should ask her what the killer does. Not
who he is, but what he does.”

  “We’ve already done that too, of course, but she refuses to tell us anything. Do you think they worked together?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. At any rate, she’s somehow dependent on this man because of the work he does.”

  Jacobsen nodded. Nothing more was going to happen until they moved the witness and her family to a safe place. But at least Carl had gotten a look at this Mona Ibsen.

  She was damned gorgeous for a crisis counselor.

  “That’s all,” Carl said, with a smile that was bigger and more relaxed and virile than ever before, but it wasn’t returned.

  He put his hand to his chest for a moment where he felt a sudden pain near his sternum. A hell of an unpleasant sensation. Almost as if he’d swallowed air.

  “Are you OK, Carl?” asked his boss.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Just some aftereffects, you know. I’m OK.” But that wasn’t quite true. The feeling in his chest was not good at all.

  “Oh, excuse me, Mona. Let me introduce you to Carl Mørck. A couple of months ago he was involved in a nasty shooting incident in which we lost one of our colleagues.”

  She nodded at Carl as he tried to pull himself together. Squinted her eyes a bit. Professional interest, of course, but at least that was better than nothing.

  “This is Mona Ibsen, Carl. She’s our new crisis counselor. Maybe you’ll get to know each other. We’d like to have one of our best colleagues completely back on his feet.”

  Carl took a step forward and shook her hand. Get to know each other. Damn right they would.

  He was still under a spell when he ran into Assad on his way down to the basement.

  “I got finally through, Carl,” he said.

  Carl tried to push the vision of Mona Ibsen into the back of his mind. It wasn’t easy.

  “Got through to what?” he asked.

  “I called TelegramsOnline at least the ten times, and got only through fifteen minutes ago,” Assad said while Carl tried to collect his thoughts. “Maybe they can then tell us who sent the telegram to Merete Lynggaard. They are working on it, at least.”

  18

  2003

  It didn’t take long at all for Merete to get used to the pressure. A slight rushing in her ears for a few days, and then it was gone. But the worst thing was not the pressure.

  It was the light shining overhead.

  Eternal light was hundreds of times worse than eternal darkness. The light revealed the pitiful state of her life. A freezing room. Grayish walls, sharp corners. The gray buckets, the colorless food. The light provided ugliness and coldness. It brought with it the realization that she couldn’t break through this armored box of a room. That the lifeline through the retractable door couldn’t be used as a means of escape. That this cement hell was her coffin and her grave. Now she couldn’t simply close her eyes and slip away whenever it suited her. The light forced its way in, even through her closed eyelids. Only when fatigue completely overwhelmed her could she fall asleep and evade it.

  And time became interminable.

  Every day when she finished eating and sat there licking her fingers clean, she stared into space and memorized the day. “Today is the twenty-seventh of July, two thousand two. I am thirty-two years and twenty-one days old. I’ve been here for one hundred and forty-seven days. My name is Merete Lynggaard, and I’m OK. My brother’s name is Uffe, and he was born on the tenth of May, nineteen seventy-three.” That was how she always started off. Sometimes she also named her parents, sometimes other people. Every single day she made herself remember their names. Along with lots of other things. She thought about the blue sky, the smell of other people, the sound of a dog barking. Thoughts that could lead to other thoughts that would allow her to slip out of the cold room.

  She knew that one day she was going to go mad. This would be the way to escape the gloomy thoughts that kept whirling around in her head. But she fought hard against it. She was by no means ready for that.

  And this was the reason why she kept away from the two meter-high portholes that she’d first located in the dark by running her hands over the walls. They were at eye level, and nothing from the other side was visible through the mirrored glass. After a few days when her eyes had adjusted to the light, she stood up very cautiously, afraid of being startled by her own reflection. And then, as she slowly raised her eyes, she finally came face to face with herself. The sight had pierced deep into her very soul, sending shivers through her body. What she saw made such a violent impression on her that she had to shut her eyes for a moment. It wasn’t because she looked terrible, as she’d feared. No, that wasn’t it. Her hair was matted and greasy and her skin was pale, but that wasn’t it, either.

  It was the fact that she was looking at a person who was lost. A person who had been condemned to death. A stranger—completely alone in the world.

  “You are Merete,” she’d said out loud, watching herself enunciate the words. “That’s me standing there,” she’d said then, wishing it weren’t true. She’d felt separated from her body, and yet that was her standing there. It was enough to make a person crazy.

  Then she’d retreated from the portholes and squatted down. Tried to sing a bit, but the voice she heard seemed to be coming from a different person. So she curled up in a fetal position and prayed to God. And when she was done, she’d started praying again. Praying until her soul was lifted out of the insane trance and into another. And she’d sought refuge in dreams and memories, promising herself that she would never stand in front of that mirror to look at herself again.

  As time passed, she learned to pay attention to the signals coming from her body. Her stomach told her when the food was late in being delivered, when the pressure was vacillating a bit, and when she slept best.

  The intervals between the replacing of the buckets were quite regular. She had tried counting the seconds from the moment her stomach told her it was time, until the buckets arrived. There was at most a difference of half an hour in feeding times, so she had a schedule to hold on to, assuming that she continued to receive food once a day.

  Knowing this was both a comfort and a curse. A comfort because it gave her a connection to the schedules and rhythms of the outside world. And a curse for the very same reason. Outside it was summer, then autumn, then winter; here inside it was nothing. She imagined the summer rain drenching her body, washing away the degradation and smell. She saw the glow of the midsummer-night bonfires and the Christmas tree in all its glory. Not a single day without its rhythms. She knew the dates and what they meant. Out there in the world.

  So she sat alone on the bare floor, focusing her thoughts on life outside. It wasn’t easy. Often it almost eluded her, but she was determined. Each day had its significance.

  The day when Uffe turned twenty-nine and a half, she leaned against the cold wall and imagined herself stroking his hair as she congratulated him. In her mind she decided to bake him a cake and send it to him. First she had to buy all the ingredients. She would put on her coat and defy the autumn storms. And she would do her shopping wherever she pleased. In the culinary section on the lower floor of the Magasin department store. She would buy whatever she liked. Nothing was too good for Uffe on that special day.

  And Merete counted the days as she speculated on the intentions of her kidnappers and who they might be. Sometimes a faint shadow seemed to slide across one of the mirrored panes, making her shudder. She covered her body when she washed herself. Stood with her back turned when she was naked. Pulled the toilet bucket over to the space between the panes so they wouldn’t be able to see her sitting on it.

  Because she knew they were there. It would be pointless if they weren’t. For a while she talked to them, but she didn’t do that very often anymore. They never answered anyway.

  She had asked them for sanitary napkins but never got any. When she was menstruating heavily, there was never enough toilet paper, and she simply had to make do with what she had.

 
She had also asked for a toothbrush, but didn’t get that either, and this worried her. So instead, she massaged her gums with her index finger and tried to clean between her teeth by forcing air through the spaces, but it didn’t do much good. When she blew on the palm of her hand, she could smell how her breath was getting worse and worse.

  One day she pulled a plastic stiffener out of the hood on her down jacket. It was a nylon stick that was suitably rigid, but too thick to use as a toothpick. So she decided to break off a piece and then started filing down the shortest section, using her front teeth. “Be careful not to get any plastic stuck in your teeth. You’ll never get it out,” she warned herself, taking her time.

  When she was able to clean the spaces between her teeth for the first time in a year, she was filled with a huge sense of relief. The little stick was suddenly her dearest possession. She needed to take good care of it, along with the rest of the stiffener.

  The voice spoke to her a while before she thought it would. She had awoken on her thirty-third birthday with a feeling in her stomach that told her it might still be night. She sat and stared at the mirrored panes for what seemed like hours as she tried to figure out what was going to happen next. She’d thought countless times about the question and how to answer it. Names and events and motives had passed through her mind again and again, but she still knew no more than she did a year earlier. It might have something to do with money. Maybe it was related to the Internet. Or an experiment. An insane person’s attempt to show what the human organism and psyche were capable of enduring.

  But she had no intention of succumbing to such an experiment. No way.

  When the voice started speaking, she wasn’t prepared. Her stomach hadn’t yet signaled that it was hungry. The voice frightened her, but this time it was more from the tension that was released than from the shock when the silence was suddenly broken.