The Keeper of Lost Causes

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “And the furnace was the closest thing?”

  “Yes, Carl. Just right next to me.”

  “But afterward, why didn’t she take the briefcase with her into the living room or her home office?”

  “I will get to that, Carl, just in a minute. I looked up at the furnace, but the briefcase was not there so. I did not think it would be either. But do you know what I saw, Carl?”

  Carl just stared at him. Obviously Assad would answer his own question.

  “I saw that just between the furnace and the ceiling there was at least a whole three feet of air.”

  “Fantastic,” replied Carl feebly.

  “And then I thought that she would not lay the briefcase down on the dirty furnace because it once belonged to her father, so she took care of it.”

  “I don’t quite follow you.”

  “She did not lay it, Carl. She set it up on the furnace then. The way you set a briefcase on the floor. There was plenty of room.”

  “So that’s what she did, and then it toppled over behind the furnace.”

  Assad’s smile was confirmation enough. “The rip on the other side is new. See for yourself.”

  Carl closed the briefcase and turned it around. It didn’t look very new, in his opinion.

  “I wiped off the briefcase because it was covered with dust, so maybe the rip looks a little dark now. But it looked very fresh when I found it. This is true, Carl.”

  “Confound it, Assad—you wiped off the briefcase? And I suppose you’ve also touched everything inside?”

  He was still nodding, but with less enthusiasm.

  “Assad.” Carl took a deep breath so he wouldn’t sound too harsh. “Next time you find something important in a case, you keep your mitts off it, OK?”

  “Mitts?”

  “Your hands, damn it, Assad. You can destroy valuable evidence when you do something like that. Do you understand?”

  He nodded. No longer enthusiastic. “I pulled my sleeve down over my hand, Carl.”

  “OK. Good thinking, Assad. So you think the other rip happened in the same way?” He turned the briefcase around again. The two rips were undeniably similar. So the old rip hadn’t come from the car accident back in 1986.

  “Yes. I think it was not the first time that the briefcase fell behind the furnace. I found it completely squeezed tight in between the pipes behind the oil furnace. I had to tug and pull to get it out. Merete tried the same thing, I am just sure of that.”

  “And why didn’t it ever fall down more than twice?”

  “It probably did, because there was a big draft from the wind in the utility room when you opened the door, but maybe it did not fall all the way down.”

  “Let’s go back to my other question. Why didn’t she take it with her into the house?”

  “She wanted to have her peace when she was home. She did not want to hear her mobile telephone, Carl.” Assad raised his eyebrows, and his eyes grew big. “This is what I think.”

  Carl looked inside the briefcase. Merete brought it home; that much seemed logical. Inside were her appointment diary and maybe also notes that in certain situations might prove useful. But she usually brought home lots of documents to review; there was always plenty of work she could be doing. She had a landline, but very few people had that number. Her cell phone was for a wider circle; that was the number on her business card.

  “And you don’t think she could hear her cell phone inside the house if she left it in her briefcase in the utility room?”

  “No way,” said Assad in English.

  Carl hadn’t realized he knew any English.

  “So, here you are. Two grown men having a cozy little chat?” said a bright voice behind them.

  Neither of them had heard Lis from the homicide department come down the hallway.

  “I have a couple more things for you. They came in from the southeast Jutland district.” Her perfume filled the room, almost a match for Assad’s incense, but with an entirely different effect. “They apologize for the delay, but some of the staff have been off sick.”

  She handed the folders to Assad, who was profuse in his eagerness to accommodate, then gave Carl a look that could stir any man deep in the groin.

  He stared at Lis’s moist lips and tried to recall when he’d last had any intimate contact with the opposite sex. The image of a pink two-room apartment belonging to a divorcée clearly appeared all too clearly in his mind. She’d had lavender blossoms in a bowl of water and tea-light candles and a bloodred cloth draped over the bedside lamp. But he couldn’t remember the woman’s face.

  “What did you say to Bak, Carl?” asked Lis.

  He emerged from his erotic reverie and looked into her light blue eyes, which had turned a bit darker now.

  “Bak? Is he wandering around upstairs whining?”

  “Not at all. He went home. But his colleagues said that he was as pale as a ghost after talking to you in the boss’s office.”

  Carl connected Merete Lynggaard’s cell phone to the charger, hoping the battery wasn’t dead. Assad’s eager fingers—shirtsleeves notwithstanding—had touched everything inside the briefcase, so a forensic examination would be hopeless. The damage had already been done.

  Only three pages in the notebook had any writing on them; the rest were blank. The notes were mostly about the municipal home-help arrangement and schedule planning, respectively. Very disappointing and no doubt indicative of the daily life that Merete had left behind.

  Then he stuck his hand into a side pocket and pulled out three or four crumpled pieces of paper. The first was a receipt from April 3, 2001, for a Jack & Jones jacket.

  The rest were some of those folded sheets of white A4 paper that could be found in the bottom of any healthy boy’s schoolbag. Handwritten in pencil, more or less illegible, and of course undated.

  Carl aimed the desk lamp at the top one, smoothing it out a bit. Only ten words. “Can we talk after my presentation regarding the tax reform?” Signed with the initials TB. Countless possibilities, but “Tage Baggesen” would be a good guess. At least that was what Carl chose to believe.

  He smiled. Yeah, that was a good one. Baggesen had wanted to talk to Merete Lynggaard, had he? Well, it probably hadn’t done him much good.

  Carl smoothed out the next piece of paper and quickly scanned the message; it gave him an entirely different feeling in his bones. This time the tone was very personal. Baggesen was backed into a corner. It said:

  “I don’t know what will happen if you go public with it, Merete. I beg you not to. TB.”

  Then Carl picked up the last sheet of paper. The writing had been almost completely rubbed off, as if it had been taken out of the briefcase over and over. He turned it this way and that, deciphering the sentences one word at a time.

  “I thought we understood each other, Merete. The whole situation pains me deeply. I implore you again: Please don’t let it go any further. I’m in the process of divesting myself of the whole thing.”

  This time there were no initials serving as a signature, but there was no doubt that the handwriting was the same.

  Carl grabbed the phone and punched in the number for Kurt Hansen.

  A secretary in the office of the Conservative Party answered. She was polite but told him that unfortunately Kurt Hansen was unavailable at the moment. Would he care to wait on the line? As far as she could tell, the meeting would be finishing in a couple of minutes.

  Carl looked at the pieces of paper lying in front of him as he waited with the receiver to his ear. They had been in the briefcase since March 2002, and most likely for a whole year prior to that. Maybe it was something trivial, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Merete Lynggaard had kept them because they might be important at some point, but maybe not.

  After listening to a few minutes of chit-chat in the background, Carl heard a click and then Kurt Hansen’s distinctive voice.

  “What can I do for you, Carl?” asked the MP, not bothering with any introduct
ory remarks.

  “How can I find out when Tage Baggesen proposed legislation for a tax reform?”

  “Why the hell would you want to know that, Carl?” He laughed. “Nothing could be less interesting than what the Radical Center thinks about taxes.”

  “I need to establish a specific time.”

  “Well, that’s going to be difficult. Baggesen presents legislative proposals every other second.” He laughed again. “OK, joking aside. Baggesen has been the traffic policy chairman for at least five years. I don’t know why he withdrew from the tax chairmanship. Wait just a minute.” Hansen placed his hand over the phone as he mumbled something to someone in his office.

  “We think it was in early 2001 under the old government. Back then he had more opportunity for that sort of shenanigan. Our guess is March or April 2001.”

  Carl nodded with satisfaction. “OK, Kurt. That fits in with what I thought. Thanks. You couldn’t transfer me to Tage Baggesen, could you?”

  He heard a few beeps on the line before he was connected with a secretary who told him that Baggesen was out of the country on a fact-finding trip to Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany to take a look at tram networks. He’d be back on Monday.

  Fact-finding trip? Tram networks? They had to be kidding. A holiday was what Carl would call it. Pure and simple.

  “I need his mobile number. Would you be so kind as to tell me what it is?”

  “I don’t think I’m allowed to do that.”

  “Now listen here, you’re not talking to some farmer from Funen. I can find out that number in a matter of minutes, if I have to. But don’t you think Tage Baggesen would be sorry to hear that your office refused to assist me?”

  There was a lot of crackling on the line, but it was still possible to hear that Baggesen’s voice sounded anything but enthusiastic.

  “I’ve got some old messages here, and I just need to have an explanation from you,” Carl said, his tone mild. He’d already seen how the guy could react. “It’s nothing special; just a formality.”

  “Go ahead.” The sharp tone of voice was clearly trying to distance itself from their conversation three days ago.

  Carl read the messages, one after the other. By the time he got to the last one, Baggesen seemed to have stopped breathing on the other end of the line.

  “Baggesen?” Carl said. “Are you still there?”

  And then he heard only a beeping on the phone.

  I hope he doesn’t throw himself into the river now, thought Carl, trying to remember which one ran through Budapest. He took down the piece of paper with the list of suspects and added Tage Baggesen’s initials to item number four: “‘Colleagues’ at Christiansborg.”

  He had just put down the phone when it began to ring.

  “Beate Lunderskov,” said a woman’s voice. Carl had no idea who she was.

  “We’ve examined Merete Lynggaard’s old hard drive, and I’m sorry to say that it has been very efficiently wiped clean.”

  Now it dawned on Carl who she was. One of the women from the Democrats’ office.

  “But I thought you kept hard drives because you wanted to save the information on them.”

  “That’s true, but apparently nobody informed Merete’s secretary, Søs Norup.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she’s the one who erased it, according to the note printed very neatly on the back. It says: “Formatted on March 20, 2002, Søs Norup.’ I’m holding it in my hand.”

  “But that was almost three weeks after Merete disappeared.”

  “Yes, so it would appear.”

  Damn Børge Bak and his gang. Had they done anything in this investigation by the book?

  “Couldn’t we send it in for closer analysis? There must be people who can retrieve erased data that’s been buried deep,” said Carl.

  “I think that’s already been done. Just a minute.” He could hear her rummaging around, and then she was back, a note of satisfaction in her voice. “Yes, here’s the report. They tried to reconstitute the data at the Down Under shop on Store Kongensgade in early April 2002. There’s a detailed explanation as to why they weren’t successful. Do you want me to read it to you?”

  “That’s not necessary,” he replied. “Søs Norup apparently knew how to make a proper job of it.”

  “Apparently. She was a very meticulous sort of person.”

  Carl thanked her and hung up.

  He sat there staring for a moment before he lit a cigarette. Then he picked up Merete Lynggaard’s worn diary from the desk and opened it with a feeling that bordered on reverence. That was the way he always felt when he had the chance to examine a lifeline to the last days of a murder victim.

  Like the notes he’d already seen, the handwriting in the diary was almost illegible and showed signs of great haste. Capital letters written down in a hurry. Ns and Gs that weren’t closed up; words that ran into each other. He started with the meeting with the placenta special-interest group on Wednesday, February 20, 2002. Farther down on the page it said: “Café Bankeråt 6:30 p.m.” That was all.

  On the following days there was hardly a line that wasn’t filled in; quite a hectic schedule, he could see, but no remarks of a personal nature.

  As he approached Merete’s last day at work, a feeling of desperation began settling over him. There was absolutely nothing that might give him any leads. Then he turned to the last page. Friday, March 1, 2002. Two committee meetings and another with lobbyists. That was all. Everything else had been lost to the past.

  He pushed the book away and looked down at the empty briefcase. Had it really spent five years behind the furnace for no good reason? Then he picked up the diary again and leafed through the rest of the pages. Like most people, Merete Lynggaard had used only the calendar and the phone list in the back.

  He began running through the phone numbers from the beginning. He could have skipped to D or H, but he wanted to keep his disappointment at bay. Under A, B, and C he recognized ninety percent of the names. There was little similarity with his own phone book, which was dominated by names like Jesper and Vigga and a sea of people who lived in Rønneholt Park. It was easy to conclude that Merete hadn’t had many personal friends. In fact, none at all. A beautiful woman with a brain-damaged brother and a hell of a lot of work—and that was it. He reached the letter D, knowing that he wouldn’t find Daniel Hale’s phone number there. Merete didn’t list her contacts by their first names, the way Vigga did; different strokes for different folks. Who the hell would look up Sweden’s prime minister under G for Göran? Besides Vigga, that is.

  And then he saw it. The moment he turned the page to H, he knew that the whole case had reached a turning point. They’d talked about an accident, they’d talked about suicide, and finally they’d ended up high and dry. Along the way there had been indications that something was odd about the Lynggaard case, but this page in the phone book practically screamed it out loud. The whole appointment diary was filled with hastily jotted notes. Letters and numbers that even his stepson could have written neater, and that told him nothing. There was nothing pretty about her handwriting; it wasn’t at all what might be expected of a rising star like Merete. But nowhere had she changed her mind about what she’d written. Nothing had been corrected or edited. She knew what she wanted to write every time. Carefully considered, unerring. Except here in her phone book under the letter H. Here something was different. Carl couldn’t be certain that it had anything to do with Daniel Hale’s name, but deep inside, where a cop plumbs his last reserves, he knew that he’d hit the bull’s-eye. Merete had crossed out a name with a thick line of ink. It was no longer possible to read, but underneath it had once said “Daniel Hale” and a phone number. He was sure of it.

  Carl smiled. So he was going to need the help of the forensic team after all. They’d better do a good job of it, and quickly.

  “Assad,” he called. “Come in here.”

  For a moment he heard some clattering out in the co
rridor, and then Assad was standing in the doorway holding a bucket and wearing the green rubber gloves.

  “I’ve got a job for you. The tech guys need to find a way to read this number.” He pointed to the crossed-out line. “Lis can tell you what the procedure is. Tell them we need it ASAP.”

  Carl knocked cautiously on the door to Jesper’s room, but of course got no response. Not home, as usual, he thought, noting the absence of the hundred and twelve decibels that normally bombarded the door from inside. But it turned out that Carl was mistaken, which became apparent when he opened the door.

  The girl whose breasts Jesper was groping under her blouse let out a shriek that pierced right to the bone, and Jesper’s furious expression underscored the gravity of the situation.

  “Sorry,” said Carl reluctantly as Jesper got his hands untangled, and the girl’s cheeks turned as red as the background color of the Che Guevara poster hanging on the wall behind them. Carl knew her. She was no more than fourteen, but looked twenty. She lived on Cedervangen. Her mother had probably looked just like her at one time, but over the years had come to the bitter realization that it wasn’t always an advantage to look older than one was.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Carl?” shouted Jesper as he jumped up from the sofa bed.

  Carl apologized again and mentioned that he had, in fact, knocked on the door, as the generation gap echoed through the house.

  “Just go on with . . . what you were doing. I just have a quick question for you, Jesper. Do you know where you put your old Playmobil toys?”

  Jesper looked as if he were ready to hurl a hand grenade at his stepfather. Even Carl could see that the question was rather ill-timed.

  He nodded apologetically to the girl. “I know it sounds strange, but I need them for my investigation.” He turned to look at Jesper, who was glaring at him. “Do you still have those plastic figures, Jesper? I’d be happy to pay you for them.”

  “Get the hell out of here, Carl. Go downstairs and see Morten. Maybe you can buy some from him. But you’ll need a fat checkbook for that.”