The Keeper of Lost Causes

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “Do any of these look like the one you saw at the crime scene in Amager?”

  It was the strangest lineup Carl had ever taken part in. Which of these shirts did it? That was the question. It was almost a joke. Shirts had never been his specialty. He wouldn’t even be able to recognize his own.

  “I realize it’s difficult after such a long time, Carl,” said Jørgensen wearily. “But it would be a big help if you could try.”

  “Why the hell do you think the perp would be wearing the same shirt months later? Even you lot must change your gear once in a while out here in the sticks.”

  Jørgensen ignored the remark. “We just want to try everything.”

  “And how can you be sure that the witness who saw the alleged killer from a distance and, to cap it all, at night, would be able to remember how a red-checked shirt looked with such accuracy that you could use it as a lead in the investigation? These shirts look like four peas in a pod, damn it! OK, they’re not identical, but there must be thousands of other shirts that look just like them.”

  “The guy who saw the shirt works in a clothing shop. We believe him. He was very precise when he drew a picture of it.”

  “Did he also draw a picture of the man inside it? Wouldn’t that have been better?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did. Not a bad drawing, but not great either. It’s not as easy to draw a person as it is to draw a shirt.”

  Carl looked at the sketch they now placed on top of the shirts. An ordinary-looking guy. If he didn’t know better, the man could be a photocopier salesman in Slagelse. Round glasses, clean-shaven, innocent-looking eyes, with a boyish set to his mouth.

  “I don’t recognize him. How tall did the witness say he was?”

  “At least six feet, maybe more.”

  Then the detective took the drawing away and pointed at the shirts. Carl studied each of them. Offhand, they all looked pretty much the same.

  Then he closed his eyes and tried to picture the shirt in his mind.

  “What happened then?” asked Assad on the way back to Copenhagen.

  “Nothing. They all looked the same to me. I can’t really remember that damn shirt anymore.”

  “So maybe then you got a picture of them to take home?” Carl didn’t answer. He was far away in his thoughts. At the moment he was seeing Anker lying dead on the floor next to him, and Hardy gasping on top of him. Why the fuck hadn’t he shot those men? All he’d had to do was turn around when he heard them on their way into the barracks, and then none of this would have happened. Anker would be sitting next to him behind the wheel of the car instead of this strange being named Assad. And Hardy! Hardy wouldn’t be chained to a bed for the rest of his life, for fuck’s sake.

  “Could they not just send you the pictures right away first, Carl?”

  He looked at his driver. Sometimes those eyes of his had such a devilishly innocent expression under the inch-thick eyebrows.

  “Yes, Assad. Of course they could have.”

  He checked out the signs posted above the motorway. Only a couple of kilometers to Tåstrup.

  “Turn off here,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Assad as the car crossed the solid lines and took the exit ramp on two wheels.

  “Because I want to take a look at the place where Daniel Hale died.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who was interested in Merete Lynggaard.”

  “How do you know about that, Carl?”

  “Bak told me. Hale was killed in a car crash. I have the police report with me.”

  Assad gave a low whistle, as if car wrecks were a cause of death reserved only for people who were very, very unlucky.

  Carl glanced at the speedometer. Maybe Assad should let up a little on the speed, before they ended up in the statistics as well.

  Even though it was five years since Daniel Hale lost his life on the Kappelev highway, it wasn’t hard to see traces left by the accident. His car had crashed into a building, which afterward had undergone rudimentary repairs; most of the soot had been washed off, but as far as Carl could tell, the majority of the insurance money must have gone to other uses.

  He looked down the long expanse of open road. What bad luck for the man to drive right into that ugly building. Only thirty feet to either side and his car would have sailed into the fields.

  “Very unlucky. What do you say, Carl?”

  “Damned unlucky.”

  Assad kicked at the tree stump still standing in front of the scarred wall. “He drove into the tree, and the tree snapped like a stick, and then he rammed into the wall and the car started to burn, right?”

  Carl nodded and turned around. He knew that farther along was a side road. It was apparently from that road that the other vehicle had pulled out, as far as he could remember from the police report.

  He pointed north. “Daniel Hale came from that direction, driving his Citroën from Tåstrup. According to the other driver and the police measurements, they crashed at that spot there.” He pointed at the line in the middle of the road. “Maybe Hale fell asleep. In any case, he drove over the center line and ran right into the oncoming vehicle. Then Hale’s car was flung back, right into the tree and the building. The whole thing didn’t take more than a split second.”

  “What happened to him, the man in the other car?”

  “Well, he landed out there,” said Carl, pointing to a flat piece of land that the EU had allowed to go fallow years ago.

  Assad gave another low whistle. “And him nothing happened to?”

  “No. He was driving some sort of gigantic four-by-four. You’re out in the country now, Assad.”

  His partner looked as if he knew exactly what Carl was talking about. “There are also many four-by-fours in Syria,” he said.

  Carl nodded, but he wasn’t really listening. “It’s strange, isn’t it, Assad?” he said then.

  “What? That he drove into the building?”

  “No, that he happened to die the day after Merete Lynggaard disappeared. The man that Merete had just met and who might have been in love with her. Very strange.”

  “You think maybe it was suicide? That he was so sad because she disappeared down into the sea?” Assad’s expression changed a bit as he looked at Carl. “He killed himself maybe because he was the one who murdered Merete. It has happened before, Carl.”

  “Suicide? No. Then he would have rammed the building on purpose. No, it definitely wasn’t suicide. And besides, he couldn’t have killed her. He was on a plane when Merete disappeared.”

  “OK.” Assad touched the scarred surface of the wall. “So maybe it could not be him either who brought the letter that said, ‘Have a nice trip to Berlin.’”

  Carl nodded and looked at the sun, which was about to settle in the west. “You could be right.”

  “What are we doing then here, Carl?”

  “What are we doing?” He stared out over the fields, where the first weeds of spring were already taking hold. “I’ll tell you, Assad. We’re investigating. That’s what we’re doing.”

  25

  2007

  “Thank you for arranging this meeting for me, and for agreeing to see me again so soon.” He shook hands with Birger Larsen, adding, “This won’t take long.” He looked around at the familiar faces gathered in the Democrats’ vice-chairman’s office.

  “All right, Mørck. I’ve invited all of the people who worked with Merete Lynggaard just before she disappeared. You might recognize a few of them.”

  Carl nodded to everyone. Yes, he did recognize some of them. A number of the politicians sitting here might be able to knock the present government out of power during the next election. One could always hope so, at least. Here sat the party spokesperson in a knee-length skirt; a couple of the more prominent members of parliament; and a few people from the party office, including the secretary Marianne Koch, who sent Carl a flirtatious look, reminding him that in only three hours he was due to be crossexamined by Mona Ibsen.


  “As Birger Larsen has no doubt told you, we’re investigating Merete Lynggaard’s disappearance one more time, before we close the case. And in that connection, I need to find out anything that might help me to understand Merete’s behavior during those last few days, as well as her state of mind. It’s my impression that back then, at quite an early stage in the investigation, the police came to the conclusion that she fell overboard by accident, and they were probably right. If that was the case, we’ll never know for certain what happened. After five years in the sea, her body would have decomposed long ago.”

  Everyone nodded, looking both solemn and sad. These were the people that Merete would have counted among her colleagues. Perhaps with the exception of the party’s new “crown princess.”

  “Many things have turned up that point to an accident,” Carl continued, “so you’d have to be a bit of a conspiracy nerd to think otherwise. At the same time, we in Department Q are a bunch of skeptical devils, and that’s probably why we were given this assignment.” Everyone smiled a bit. At least they were listening. “So I’m going to ask all of you a number of questions, and don’t hesitate to speak up if you have anything to say.”

  Most of them nodded again.

  “Do any of you remember whether Merete had a meeting with a group lobbying for placenta research shortly before she disappeared?”

  “Yes, I do,” said someone from the party office. “It was a delegation put together for the occasion by Bille Antvorskov from BasicGen.”

  “Bille Antvorskov? You mean the Bille Antvorskov? The billionaire?”

  “Yes, that’s right. He put together the group and arranged a meeting with Merete. They were making the rounds.”

  “Making the rounds? With Merete Lynggaard?”

  “No.” The woman smiled. “That’s what we call it when a special-interest lobby meets with all the parties, one after the other. The group was trying to put together a majority of votes in the Folketing.”

  “Would there be a record of the meeting anywhere?”

  “Yes, there should be. I don’t know whether it was printed out, but we might be able to find it on the computer belonging to Merete’s secretary.”

  “Does that computer still exist?” asked Carl. He could hardly believe what he was hearing.

  The woman from the party office smiled. “We always save the hard drives when we change operating systems. When we switched to Windows XP, at least ten hard drives had to be replaced.”

  “Aren’t all of you on a network?”

  “Yes, we are, but back then Merete’s secretary and a few others weren’t hooked up to it.”

  “Paranoid, perhaps?” He smiled at the woman.

  “Maybe.”

  “Would you be willing to try to find the minutes of that meeting for me?”

  She nodded again.

  He turned to the rest of the group. “One of the participants at that meeting was a man named Daniel Hale. From what I’ve heard, he and Merete were interested in each other. Is there anyone here who can confirm or expand on this?”

  Several people exchanged glances. Apparently he’d hit home again. Now it was just a matter of who wanted to answer.

  “I don’t know his name, but I saw her talking to a man down in Snapstinget, the MPs’ restaurant.” It was the party spokesperson who decided to take the floor. She was an irritating but tough young lady who looked good on TV and would obviously hold major ministry posts in the future, when the right time came. “She looked very pleased to see him, and she seemed rather distracted while she was talking with the chairpersons from the Socialist’s and Radical Center’s health committees.” She smiled. “I think plenty of people noticed.”

  “Because Merete didn’t usually act that way? Is that what you mean?”

  “I think it was the first time anyone here had ever seen Merete’s attention waver. Yes, it was highly unusual.”

  “Could he have been this Daniel Hale that I mentioned?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is there anyone else who knows about this?”

  They all shook their heads.

  “How would you describe the man?” was Carl’s next question for the party spokesperson.

  “He was slightly hidden by the pillar he was sitting behind, but he was slim and well dressed and suntanned, as far as I remember.”

  “How old was he?”

  She shrugged. “A little older than Merete, I think.”

  Slim, well dressed, a little older than Merete. If she hadn’t said that he was suntanned, the description would have applied to all the men in the room, including himself, if one didn’t mind adding five or ten years at the wrong end.

  “I imagine there must have been a lot of documents from Merete’s time that couldn’t simply be dumped on her successor.” He nodded at Birger Larsen. “I’m thinking about appointment diaries, notebooks, handwritten notes, and things like that. Were those sorts of things just thrown out or shredded? No one could really know whether she would be coming back, could they?”

  Again it was the woman from the party office who responded. “The police took some of it, and some of it was discarded. I don’t think much was left.”

  “What about her appointment diary? Where did that end up?”

  She shrugged. “Not here, anyway.”

  Marianne Koch broke in. “Merete always took her diary home with her.” Her tone of voice did not invite contradiction. “Always,” she emphasized.

  “What did it look like?”

  “It was a very ordinary time system calendar, in a worn, reddish-brown leather cover. A daily planner, appointment book, notebook and phone list all in one.”

  “And it hasn’t turned up,” Carl added. “That much I know. So we have to assume that it disappeared into the sea with her.”

  “I don’t believe that,” the secretary replied at once.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Merete always carried a small purse, and the diary simply wouldn’t fit inside. She almost always put it in her briefcase, instead, and I can guarantee that she wouldn’t take her briefcase along to stand on the sun deck of a ship. She was on holiday, after all, so why would she take it with her? It wasn’t in her car, either, was it?”

  Carl shook his head. Not as far as he could recall.

  Carl had been waiting a long time for the crisis counselor with the lovely ass, and now he was starting to feel uneasy. If she’d arrived on time, he would have let his natural charm guide him forward, but now, after having repeated his lines in his mind and practiced his smiles for more than twenty minutes, he was feeling deflated.

  She didn’t look particularly guilt-stricken when she finally made her arrival on the third floor, but she did apologize. It was the sort of self-confidence that drove Carl wild. It was also what he’d fallen for when he first met Vigga. That and her infectious laugh.

  Mona Ibsen sat down across from him. The light from outside on Otto Mønsteds Gade shone on the back of her neck, creating a halo around her head. The soft light revealed delicate lines on her face; her lips were sensual and a deep red. Everything about her signaled high class. Carl locked eyes with her so as not to dwell on her voluptuous breasts. Nothing in the world could make him want to break out of the state he was in.

  She asked him about the case out in Amager. Wanted to know about the specific timeline, actions, and consequences. She asked him about everything that was of no significance, and Carl laid it on thick. A little more blood than in reality. Shots that were a little more powerful, sighs a little deeper. And she stared at him intently, making note of the key points in his story. When he got to the moment when he had to talk about the impression it had made on him to see his dead and wounded friends and how badly he’d been sleeping ever since, she pushed her chair back from the table, placed her business card in front of him, and began to pack up her things.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as her notebook disappeared into her leather briefcase.

  “I
t seems to me that you should be asking yourself that question. When you’re ready to tell the truth, make another appointment to see me.”

  He gave her a frown. “What does that mean? Everything I just told you is exactly how it happened.”

  She pulled the briefcase close to the slight curve of her stomach under the tight skirt. “First of all, I can tell by looking at you that you have no trouble sleeping. Second, you’ve really been exaggerating the details of your whole account. Or did you think I hadn’t read the report in advance?” He was about to protest when she held up her hand. “Third, I can see it in your eyes when you mention Hardy Henningsen and Anker Høyer. I don’t know why, but you’ve got some unfinished business with that incident. And when you mention your two colleagues who weren’t as lucky to escape with their lives and limbs intact, it reminds you of something, and you practically come unglued. When you’re ready to tell me the truth, I’ll be happy to see you again. Until then, I can’t help you.”

  He uttered a small sound that was meant as a protest, but it died out of its own accord. Instead, he looked at her with an expression of desire that women no doubt could read but could never know for sure was there.

  “Wait a minute,” he forced himself to say before she went out the door. “You’re probably right. I just didn’t realize it.”

  He frantically considered what he could say to her before she turned around and made a move to leave.

  “Maybe we could talk about it over dinner?” The words just flew out of his mouth.

  He saw that he’d misfired badly. It was such a stupid thing to say that she didn’t even bother to deride him.

  Instead, she gave him a look that expressed concern more than anything else.

  Bille Antvorskov had just turned seventy and was a regular guest on TV2’s Good Morning Denmark and other talk shows. He was a so-called expert, and was therefore presumed to know something about everything between heaven and earth. That’s how it was when Danes took someone seriously; they went all out. But the man also looked good on camera. Authoritative and mature, with striking brown eyes, a distinctive jaw, and an aura that paired the wits of a street kid with the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. And then there was the undeniable fact that he’d amassed a fortune in record time, one that would soon be reckoned among the largest in all of Denmark. On top of which, it was a fortune that had been built on highrisk medical projects carried out in the public interest, which led Danish viewers to prostrate themselves with admiration and respect.