The Keeper of Lost Causes

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Listening to him was like sitting next to an old aunt who’d never snagged a husband. Of course he’d be happy to get Helle to come to the phone if she were at home. No, she was always busy with her clients until at least . . . But wait a minute, he thought he heard her car in the driveway. She’d bought herself a new one, by the way, and he could always hear the difference between a 1.3- and a 1.6-liter engine. And it was true what the man on TV said; damned if those Suzukis didn’t deliver what they promised. At any rate it was great to get rid of their old Opel for a good price. The husband’s voice churned on and on while his wife could be heard announcing her arrival in the background with a shrill: “Hi, O-o-o-le! Are you home? Did you stack up the firewood?”

  Lucky for Ole that Social Services didn’t hear that question.

  Helle Andersen was cordial and obliging when she finally caught her breath. Carl thanked her for talking to Assad the other day and then asked if she would be able to receive by e-mail some photos he’d scanned.

  “Right now?” she asked, and in the next breath was probably going to explain why this wasn’t the most favorable moment. “I’ve brought home a couple of pizzas.” Here it came. “Ole likes them with lettuce on top, and it’s not much fun when the lettuce has a chance to sink into the cheese.”

  Carl had to wait twenty minutes before she called him back, and it sounded as if she hadn’t quite swallowed the last mouthful.

  “Did you get the e-mail I sent?”

  “Yes,” she told him. She was sitting there looking at the three files.

  “Click on the first one and tell me what you see.”

  “That’s Daniel Hale. Your assistant already showed me a picture of him. But I’ve never seen him before.”

  “Then click on the second file. What about that one?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you. His name is Dennis Knudsen. Have you ever seen him before? Maybe a few years older than in the picture?”

  She laughed. “Not wearing a silly cap like that, at any rate. No, I’ve never seen him before. I’m sure of it. He reminds me of my cousin Gorm, but Gorm is at least twice as fat.”

  It seemed to be a family trait.

  “What about the third picture? It shows a person talking to Merete at Christiansborg shortly before she disappeared. I know you can only see him from the back, but is there anything about him that seems familiar? His clothes, hair, posture, height, body type, anything at all?”

  She paused for a moment, which was a good sign.

  “I’m not sure, since the picture only shows him from the back, as you said. But I may have seen him before. Where did you think I would have seen him?”

  “That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  Come on, Helle, thought Carl. How many possibilities could there be?

  “I know you’re thinking about the man who delivered the letter. I did see him from behind, but he had on very different clothes, so it’s not easy to tell. He looks familiar, but I can’t say for sure.”

  “Then you shouldn’t say anything, dear,” said the allegedly backdamaged pizza eater in the background.

  Carl had to make an effort not to sigh. “OK,” he said. “I have one last photo that I’d like to send you.” He clicked on his e-mail.

  “It’s here,” she said ten seconds later.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  “I see a picture of the guy who was also in the second picture, I think. Dennis Knudsen. Wasn’t that his name? Here he’s only a boy, but that funny expression on his face is unmistakable. What odd cheeks he has. Yes, I’ll bet he drove go-karts when he was a boy. My cousin Gorm did too, strangely enough.”

  That was probably before he weighed a thousand pounds, Carl was tempted to say. “Take a look at the other boy standing behind Dennis. Do you recognize him?”

  There was silence on the phone. Not even the malingerer husband said a word. Carl waited. Patience was supposedly a virtue for detectives. So it was just a matter of living up to this maxim.

  “This is really creepy,” Helle Andersen said at last. Her voice seemed to have shrunk. “That’s him. I’m positive that’s him.”

  “The man who brought the letter to you at Merete’s house? Is that who you mean?”

  “Yes.” Another pause, as if she needed to gauge the photo against the ravages of time. “Is he the man you’re looking for? Do you think he had something to do with what happened to Merete? Should I be scared of him?” She sounded genuinely worried. And maybe at one time she would have had reason to be.

  “It was five years ago, so you have nothing to fear, Helle. Take it easy.” He heard her sigh. “So you think this is the same man who brought the letter. Are you sure now?”

  “It has to be. Yes, I’m sure of it. His eyes are so distinctive, you know what I mean? Oh, this is making me feel weird.”

  It’s probably just the pizza, thought Carl as he thanked the woman and put down the phone. Then he leaned back in his chair.

  He looked at the tabloid photos of Merete Lynggaard that were lying on top of the case folder. Right now Carl felt more strongly than ever that he was the link between the victim and perpetrator in this case. For the first time he felt that he was on the right track. This Atomos had lost his grip on life during childhood and grown up to do the devil’s work, to use a colorful phrase. The evil inside him had led him to Merete; the question was why and where and how? Maybe Carl would never find the answers, but he was going to try.

  Mona Ibsen could sit and polish her wedding ring in the meantime.

  Next he sent the pictures to Bille Antvorskov. In less than five minutes Carl had an answer in his e-mail inbox. Yes, one of the boys in the pictures did look like the man who’d been part of the group at Christiansborg. But Antvorskov couldn’t swear that it was the same person.

  That was enough for Carl. He was sure that Antvorskov was not the sort to swear to anything without first examining it from head to toe.

  The phone rang. It wasn’t Assad or the man from the Godhavn children’s home, as he expected. Of all people on earth to be calling him at this moment, God help him, it was Vigga.

  “What happened to you, Carl?” she said, her voice quavering.

  He tried to decipher what was going on but didn’t come up with anything before she launched into him.

  “The reception started half an hour ago, and not a soul has turned up. We have ten bottles of wine and twenty bags of snacks. If you don’t show up either, I simply don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “At your gallery? Is that what you mean?”

  A couple of sniffles told him that she was about to start sobbing.

  “I didn’t know anything about any reception.”

  “Hugin sent out fifty invitations the day before yesterday.” She sniffled one last time and then pulled the real Vigga out of the goody bag. “Why can’t I count on your support at least? You’re an investor in the gallery, after all!”

  “Try asking your wandering phantom.”

  “Who are you calling a phantom? Hugin?”

  “Do you have other lice like him crawling all over you?”

  “Hugin is just as concerned as I am that this gallery is a success.”

  Carl didn’t doubt it. Where else could the man exhibit his torn-off scraps of underwear ads and smashed McDonald’s Happy Meal figures splattered with the cheapest paint you could find?

  “I’m just saying, Vigga, that if Einstein actually remembered to post the invitations on Saturday, as you claim, then they won’t show up in anyone’s letter box until they get home from work sometime later today.”

  “Oh my God, no! Damn it!” she groaned.

  So there was probably a man in black who wasn’t getting laid tonight.

  Carl couldn’t resist feeling gleeful.

  Tage Baggesen knocked on the doorframe to his office just as Carl was lighting the cigarette that had been yelling and nagging at him for hours.

  “Yeah, w
hat is it?” said Carl, his lungs filled with smoke. Then he recognized the man clad in a nicely acquitted state of mild intoxication that sent a scent of cognac and beers wafting into the room.

  “I just wanted to apologize for cutting off our phone conversation so abruptly the other day. I needed time to think, now that everything is going to be made public.”

  Carl invited Baggesen to sit down and asked if he’d like something to drink, but the MP dismissed the offer with a wave of his hand as he took a seat. No, he wasn’t thirsty.

  “Which things did you specifically have in mind?” asked Carl, trying to make it sound as if he had more up his sleeve, which wasn’t the case at all.

  “Tomorrow I plan to resign from my position in parliament,” said Baggesen, looking around the room with weary eyes. “I’m going to meet with the chairman after we’re done talking here. Merete told me this would happen if I didn’t listen, but I didn’t want to believe her. And then I did what I never should have done.”

  Carl narrowed his eyes. “Then it’s good that the two of us clear the air before you start making confessions to everyone and his uncle.”

  The stout man nodded and bowed his head. “I bought some stocks in 2000 and 2001, and made a killing on them.”

  “What kind of stocks?”

  “All sorts of shit. And then I hired a new stockbroker who advised me to invest in weapons factories in the United States and France.”

  Not the sort of thing that the manager at Carl’s local bank in Allerød would recommend to his customers as a sound investment for their savings. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and then stubbed it out in the ashtray. No, Carl could see that these weren’t the kind of investments a leading member of the pacifist Radical Center Party would want to be known for.

  “I also leased two of my properties to massage parlors. I didn’t know about it in the beginning, but I soon found out. They were located in Strøby Egede, near where Merete lived, and people were starting to talk. I had a lot of different things going on at the time. Unfortunately, I bragged about my business deals to Merete. I was so in love with her, and she couldn’t have cared less about me. Maybe I was hoping that she’d show more interest in me if I acted like a big shot, but of course it didn’t make any difference.” He reached up to massage the back of his neck. “She wasn’t like that at all.”

  Carl fixed his eyes on the cloud of smoke until it was swallowed up by the room. “And she asked you to stop what you were doing?”

  “No, she didn’t ask me to stop.”

  “What then?”

  “She said that she might say something by mistake to her secretary, Marianne Koch. It was clear what she meant. If that secretary found out anything, everybody else would know about it in seconds. Merete just wanted to warn me.”

  “Why was she interested in your business affairs?”

  “She wasn’t. That was the whole problem.” He sighed and buried his head in his hands. “I’d been making advances for so long that she finally just wanted to get rid of me. And that was how she got her way. I’m positive that if I’d continued pressuring her, she would have leaked the information. I don’t blame her. What the hell was she supposed to do?”

  “So you decided to leave her alone, but you kept running your business ventures?”

  “I canceled the lease agreements for the massage parlors, but I kept the stocks that I owned. I didn’t sell them until shortly after 9/11.”

  Carl nodded. There were plenty of people who had made a fortune from that catastrophe.

  “How much did you make?”

  Baggesen looked up. “Nearly ten million kroner.”

  Carl stuck out his lower lip. “And then you killed Merete because she was going to blow the whistle on you?”

  That gave the member of parliament a start. Carl recognized the man’s frightened expression from the last time they’d gone a round together.

  “No, no! Why on earth would I do that? What I did wasn’t illegal, you know. The only thing that would have happened is what’s going to happen today.”

  “You would have been asked to leave your party instead of resigning?”

  Baggesen’s eyes flicked around the room and didn’t stop until he saw his own initials on the list of suspects on the whiteboard.

  “You can cross me off your list now,” he said and stood up.

  Assad didn’t show up at the office until three o’clock, which was considerably later than would be expected of a man with his modest qualifications and precarious position. For a second Carl weighed how useful it would be to bawl him out, but Assad’s cheerful expression and enthusiasm didn’t exactly invite an ambush.

  “What the hell have you been doing all this time?” he asked instead, pointing at the clock.

  “Hardy sends you his greetings, Carl. You sent me yourself up there, remember?”

  “You’ve been talking to Hardy for seven hours?” He pointed again at the clock.

  Assad shook his head. “I told him what I knew about the cyclist murder then, and do you know what he said?”

  “He told you who he thinks the killer is?”

  Assad looked surprised. “You know Hardy pretty very well, Carl. Yes, that is actually what he did.”

  “He didn’t give you a name, though. Am I right?”

  “A name? No, but he said to look for a person who was important for the witness’s children then. That it probably was not a teacher or somebody in the day-care centers but somebody they were really dependent on. The ex-husband of the witness or a doctor or maybe someone the children saw a lot. A riding instructor or something. But it had to be a person who had something to do with both of the children. I have also just said it up on the second floor.”

  “Oh really,” said Carl, pursing his lips. It was astounding how well informed Assad suddenly was. “I can just imagine Bak must have been over the moon.”

  “Over the moon?” Assad considered Carl’s choice of words. “Maybe. How would that make him look?”

  Carl shrugged. Now Assad was his old self again. “So what else have you been doing?” Judging by the way Assad’s eyebrows danced, Carl guessed that he had something up his sleeve.

  “Look what I have here, Carl.” He took Merete Lynggaard’s worn leather diary out of a plastic shopping bag and set it on the desk. “Take a look. Isn’t the man so good?”

  Carl opened the phone book to the letter H and immediately saw the transformation. Yes, the man had truly done a spectacular job. The thick line through the phone number was now gone; the number was a bit faded but clearly legible: “Daniel Hale, 25772060.” It was amazing. Even more amazing than the speed with which Carl’s fingers tapped on the computer keyboard to check the number.

  He couldn’t resist looking it up. But without any luck, of course.

  “It says it’s an invalid number. Call Lis and ask her to check out the number asap. Tell her it might well have been disconnected five years ago. We don’t know which mobile company issued it, but I’m sure she can find out. Hurry up, Assad,” said Carl, giving his assistant a pat on his granitelike shoulder.

  Carl lit a cigarette, leaned back, and summed up what they knew so far.

  Merete Lynggaard had met the fraudulent Daniel Hale at Christiansborg and had possibly carried on a flirtation with him, but then dropped him after a few days. It was unusual for her to do something like crossing out his name in her phone book; it almost seemed ritualistic. No matter what the reason for doing so, meeting the man who called himself Daniel Hale had undoubtedly been a radical experience in Merete’s life.

  Carl tried to picture her in his mind. The beautiful politician with her whole life ahead of her, who happened to meet the wrong guy. An impostor, a man with evil intentions. Several people had linked him to the boy called Atomos. The home help in Magleby thought the boy was very likely identical to the man who had brought the letter with the message: “Have a nice trip to Berlin.” And according to Bille Antvorskov, Atomos was the same person who late
r claimed to be Daniel Hale. The same boy that Dennis Knudsen’s sister claimed had exerted great influence over her brother in childhood. And by all accounts he was also the one who many years later convinced his friend Dennis to crash into the car driven by the real Daniel Hale, thereby causing his death. Complicated, and yet not really.

  By now quite a lot of evidence had piled up: there was Dennis Knudsen’s peculiar death shortly after the car accident. There was Uffe’s much too strong reaction when he saw the old photo of Atomos, who was most likely the person Merete later met as Daniel Hale. A meeting that must have required a great deal of planning.

  And finally, there was the disappearance of Merete Lynggaard.

  Carl felt acid indigestion etching its way up and almost wished he could have a sip of Assad’s sickly sweet tea.

  Carl hated waiting when it wasn’t necessary. Why the hell couldn’t he talk to that fucking teacher from the Godhavn children’s home right this minute? The boy nicknamed Atomos must have a real name and a Civil Registry number. Something that would still be valid today. He wanted to know what it was. Now!

  He stubbed out his cigarette and took down the lists from the whiteboard, scanning what he had written.

  SUSPECTS:

  1. Uffe

  2. Unknown postman—the letter about Berlin

  3. The man/woman from Café Bankeråt

  4. “Colleagues” at Christiansborg—TB + ?

  5. Murder resulting from a robbery—how much money in her purse?

  6. Sexual assault

  CHECK:

  The telegram

  The secretaries at Christiansborg

  Witnesses on the ferry Schleswig-Holstein

  The foster family after the accident—old classmates at the university. Did she have a tendency to get depressed? Was she pregnant? In love?

  Next to “Unknown postman” Carl now wrote in parentheses: “Atomos as Daniel Hale.” Then he crossed out item number four with Tage Baggesen’s initials and the question about her being pregnant at the bottom of the second page.