“What do you mean?”
“He’s sitting here brooding. He keeps looking around the kitchen, as if he doesn’t recognize it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.” In his mind Carl pictured the antique dealers’ copper pans covering the walls from floor to ceiling. The rows of crystal bowls, the pastel-colored wallpaper with the exotic fruit print. Of course Uffe wouldn’t recognize the place.
“I don’t mean the way it’s furnished. I can’t explain it. He seems scared to be here, but he won’t get into the car with me.”
“Where were you planning to take him?”
“To the police station. I’m not going to let him run away again. But he refuses to go with me. Even when the antique dealer asked him nicely.”
“Has he said anything? Made any sort of sound?”
Carl could tell that she was shaking her head. “No, no sounds. But he’s trembling. That’s what my oldest son used to do when he couldn’t have what he wanted. I remember once at the supermarket—”
“Helle, you need to call Egely. Uffe has been missing for five days now. They need to know that he’s OK.” He looked up the number for her. It was the only right thing to do. It would be a bad idea for him to get involved. The tabloids would be rubbing their ink-smeared hands with glee.
Now the small, low buildings began to appear along the old Køge highway. An ice cream stand from the old days. A former electrician’s shop that now housed a couple of buxom girls that the vice squad had had a lot of trouble with.
Carl glanced at Assad and considered whistling to see if there was still life in him. It wasn’t unheard of for people to die in the middle of a sentence, with their eyes wide open.
“Anybody home, Assad?” he asked, not expecting an answer.
Carl reached across him to open the glove compartment and take out a semiflattened packet of Lucky Strikes.
“Carl, would you mind not smoking? It makes the car stink,” said Assad, sounding surprisingly alert.
If a little smoke was going to bother him, he could walk home.
“Stop over there,” Assad went on. Maybe he’d had the same idea.
Carl shut the glove compartment and found a space to pull over near one of the side roads leading down to the beach.
“This is all wrong, Carl.” Assad turned to look at him, his eyes dark. “I have thought about what we saw out there. It was all wrong everywhere.”
Carl nodded slowly. There was no fooling this guy.
“There were four televisions inside the old woman’s house.”
“Really? I only saw one.”
“There were three next to each other, not very big, over by the end of her bed. They were sort of covered up, but I could see the light from them.”
He must have eyes like an eagle paired with an owl, thought Carl. “Three TVs that were on, covered by a blanket? Could you really see it from that distance, Assad? It was almost pitch dark in there.”
“They were there then, all the way down by the edge of the bed, up against the wall. Not very big. Almost like some kind of . . .” He was searching for the word. “Some kind of . . .”
“Monitors?”
Assad nodded. “And you know what, Carl? I have been realizing more and more in my head. There were three or four monitors. You could see a weak gray or green light through the blanket. What were they there for? Why were they on? And why were they covered up, like we must not see them?”
Carl looked at the road where trucks were rumbling their way toward town. Those were good questions.
“And now one more thing then, Carl.”
Now it was Carl who wasn’t really paying attention. He drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel. If they drove back to police headquarters and went through all the proper procedures, it would be at least two hours before they could be back down there.
Then his cell phone rang again. If it was Vigga, he’d just hang up. Why did she think he was at her disposal night and day?
But it was Lis. “Marcus Jacobsen wants to see you in his office, Carl. Where are you?”
“He’ll have to wait, Lis. I’m on my way to do a search. Is it about the newspaper article?”
“I’m not really sure, but it might be. You know how he is. He gets awfully quiet whenever anybody writes something bad about us.”
“Then tell him that Uffe Lynggaard has been found, and he’s fine. And tell him that we’re working on the case.”
“Which case?”
“The one that will make those damned newspapers write something positive about me and the department for a change.”
Then he swung the car into a U-turn, and considered switching on the flashing blue lights.
“What were you about to say to me before, Assad?”
“About the cigarettes.”
“What do you mean?”
“How long have you smoked the same brand, Carl?”
He frowned. How long had Lucky Strikes existed?
“People do not just change their brands like that, right? And she had ten packs of Prince on the table, Carl. Brand new, unopened packs. And she had such completely yellow fingers. But her son did not.”
“What are you getting at?”
“She smoked Prince with filter tips, and her son didn’t smoke. I am pretty sure.”
“So?”
“Why were there then no filters on the cigarettes that were lying almost on top in the ashtray?”
That’s when Carl turned on the siren and blue lights.
37
The same day
The work took time because the floor was smooth and she didn’t want the steady jolting of her upper body to arouse the suspicions of the people out there who were monitoring her on their screens.
She’d been sitting on the floor in the middle of the room for most of the night with her back to the cameras, sharpening the long piece of plastic stiffener that she’d twisted until she broke it in half the day before. No matter how ironic it might seem, this stiffener from the hood of her jacket was going to be her ticket out of this world.
She put the two pieces on her lap and ran her fingers over them. One would soon have a point like an awl; the other she’d already shaped into a nail file with a knife-sharp edge. That was probably the one she would use when the time came. She was afraid the pointed piece wouldn’t make a big enough hole in her artery, and if it didn’t happen fast, the blood on the floor would give her away. Not for a moment did she doubt that they’d drop the pressure in the room the second they discovered what she was up to. So her suicide had to be done efficiently and quickly.
She didn’t want to die the other way.
When she heard the voices in the loudspeakers from somewhere out in the hall, she stuck the stiffeners in her jacket pocket and hunched over, as if she had dozed off in that position. When she sat like that, Lasse often yelled at her, and she’d refuse to respond, so it was nothing unusual.
She sat there with her legs crossed, staring at the long shadow cast by her body from the floodlights. Up there on the wall was her true self. A sharply delineated silhouette of a human being sinking into decay. Wisps of hair hanging to her shoulders, a worn-out jacket wrapped around nothing. A remnant from the past that would soon disappear when the light was put out. Today was April 4, 2007. She had forty-one days left to live, but she planned to kill herself five days early, on May 10th. On that day Uffe would turn thirty-four, and she would think about him and send him thoughts of love and tenderness and about how beautiful life could be, as she slit her wrists. His shining face would be the last thing she saw. Uffe, her beloved brother.
“We’ve got to hurry!” she heard the woman shout through the loudspeakers on the other side of the glass panes. “Lasse will be here in ten minutes, so we need to get everything ready. Pull yourself together, boy!” She sounded frantic.
Merete heard a clattering sound behind the mirrored panes, and she looked over at the airlock. But no buckets appeared, and her inner clock told her it was
too early.
“But we need to have another storage battery in here, Mother!” the gaunt man shouted back in reply. “There’s not enough charge in this one. We can’t set off the explosion if we don’t change it. That’s what Lasse told me a couple of days ago.”
The explosion? An icy wave rushed through Merete’s body. Was it going to happen now?
She threw herself on to her knees and tried to think about Uffe as she used all her strength to rub the knife-shaped plastic stiffener against the smooth concrete floor. She might have only ten minutes. If she made the cut deep enough, she could lose consciousness in five. That was the important thing.
She was breathing hard, whimpering as the stiffener slowly changed shape. It was still too dull. She glanced over at the tongs, but the tips had been blunted from digging her message into the concrete floor.
“Ohhh,” she whispered. “Just one more day and I would have been ready.” Then she wiped the sweat from her brow and held her wrist up to her lips. Maybe she could bite through the artery, if she got a good grip. She nibbled a little at her flesh, but her teeth couldn’t hold fast. Then she turned her wrist around and tried to use her incisors, but her arm had grown too thin and fleshless. Her wrist bone was in the way, and her teeth weren’t sharp enough.
“What’s she doing in there?” the witch yelled in a shrill voice, pressing her face against the pane. Her eyes were wide open, the only thing visible while the rest of her was in shadow, with the blinding floodlights as a backdrop.
“Open the airlock all the way. Do it now!” she commanded her son.
Merete looked over at the flashlight that lay ready next to the hole she’d dug under the bolt of the airlock door. She dropped the stiffener and crawled on all fours to the airlock while the woman jeered at her. Everything inside Merete wept and pleaded for life.
Through the loudspeaker system she could hear the man rattling the airlock door as she grabbed the flashlight and shoved it down into the hole in the floor.
There was a clicking sound and then the turning mechanism started moving as she stared at the airlock door, her heart pounding. If the flashlight and the bolt didn’t hold, she was lost. The pressure inside of her body would be released like a grenade; that was how she pictured it.
“Oh, dear God, dear God, don’t let that happen,” she sobbed and crawled back to get the stiffener as the bolt began banging against the flashlight. She turned to watch and saw the flashlight rock slightly back and forth. Then she heard a sound she’d never heard before. Like a camera’s telephoto lens being activated, the hum of a mechanism being precisely released, followed by a quick thump against the airlock door. So now the outer door was open. All the pressure was on the inner door, and the flashlight was the only thing between her and the most horrifying death she could imagine. But the flashlight wasn’t moving anymore. The door perhaps had opened a hundredth of a millimeter, because the hissing sound of air forcing its way out of the chamber grew louder until it was like a shrieking whistle.
She felt it in her body after a few seconds. Suddenly her pulse was beating in her ears and she noticed a slight pressure in her sinuses as if a cold were settling in her head.
“She blocked the door, Mother!” shouted the man.
“So turn it off and try again, you idiot,” the woman snarled.
For a moment the wailing tone fell in pitch. Then she heard the mechanism start up, and again the sound grew louder.
They tried several times in vain to make the inner airlock door function properly as Merete kept filing the nylon stiffener.
“We need to kill her now and get her out of here. Do you understand?” shouted the she-devil outside. “Run and get the sledgehammer. It’s behind the house.”
Merete stared up at the glass panes. For the last couple of years they had served both as her prison bars and as protection against the monsters outside. If they smashed the glass, she would die instantly. The pressure would equalize in a second. Maybe she wouldn’t even have time to feel it before her life was extinguished.
She put her hands in her lap and guided the nylon knife toward her left wrist. She’d studied the artery a thousand times. That was where she needed to make the cut. Now there it lay, so fine and dark and open, in her thin, delicate skin.
Then she clenched her fist and pressed hard as she closed her eyes. The pressure on her artery didn’t feel right. It hurt but the skin refused to give way. She looked at the cut she had made. It was wide and long and seemed deep, but it wasn’t. There wasn’t even any blood. The nylon knife simply wasn’t sharp enough.
She tossed it aside and grabbed the pointed stiffener that was lying on the floor. She opened her eyes wide and estimated the exact spot where the skin around the artery seemed thinnest. Then she pressed hard. It didn’t hurt as much as she’d expected. The blood instantly colored the point red, giving her a warm, all-embracing sensation. She watched the blood come trickling out with a sense of peace in her soul.
“You’ve stabbed yourself, you bitch!” shrieked the woman as she slammed her hand against one of the portholes; the pounding of her fist echoed in the room. But Merete shut her out and felt nothing. Quietly she lay down on the floor, pushed her long hair back from her face, and stared up at the last fluorescent light that still functioned.
“I’m sorry, Uffe,” she whispered. “I couldn’t wait.” She smiled up at the image of him hovering in the room and he smiled back.
The thud of the first blow from the sledgehammer pulverized her dream vision. She looked over at the mirrored pane, which vibrated with every blow. The pounding turned the glass opaque, but otherwise nothing happened. Each blow that the man delivered to the pane was followed by an exhausted groan. Then he tried smashing the other pane, but that one also refused to break. It was clear that his thin arms weren’t used to wielding so much weight. The intervals between blows lasted longer and longer.
She smiled and looked down at her body that was lying on the floor in such a relaxed position. So this was how she, Merete Lynggaard, would look when she died. Not long from now her body would be pulverized to dog food, but it didn’t bother her to think about. By then her soul would be set free. New times would await her. She had experienced hell on earth, and she had spent most of her life in mourning. People had suffered because of her. It couldn’t be any worse in the next life, if there was one. And if there wasn’t, then what was there to fear, anyway?
She looked down the side of her body and discovered that the stain on the floor was reddish black, but not much bigger than the palm of her hand. Then she turned her wrist over to look at the puncture wound. The bleeding had practically stopped. A few last drops trickled out, then merged like the hands of twins searching for each other, and slowly congealed.
In the meantime, the pounding on the glass had stopped, so the only thing she heard was the hissing air in the crack of the airlock door and her pulse hammering in her ears. It sounded louder than before, and she noticed that she was getting a headache. At the same time, her body began to ache as if she were coming down with the flu.
Again she picked up the stiffener and pressed it deep into the wound that had just closed up. She filed the flexible stick back and forth and down, to make the hole big enough.
“I’m here now, Mum!” shouted a voice. It was Lasse.
His brother’s voice sounded frightened in the loudspeaker. “I wanted to change the battery, Lasse, but Mother told me to go and get the sledgehammer. I tried to smash the glass, but I couldn’t. I did the best I could.”
“You can’t break it like that,” Lasse replied. “It takes more than a sledgehammer. But you haven’t damaged the detonators, have you?”
“No, I was careful where I hit the glass,” said his brother. “I really was careful, Lasse.”
Merete pulled out the stiffener and looked up at the panes now pounded opaque with cracks radiating in all directions. The wound on her wrist was bleeding again, but not very much. Oh God, why wasn’t it? Had she punctu
red a vein instead of an artery?
Then she jabbed at her other wrist. Hard and deep. It bled faster. Thank God.
“We couldn’t stop the police from coming onto the property,” the witch said, suddenly.
Merete held her breath. She saw how the blood had found its way to the wound and started pouring out faster. The police? Had they been here?
She bit her lip and felt the headache getting worse, and her heartbeat was slowing down.
“They know that Hale used to own this place,” the woman went on. “One of them said that he didn’t know Daniel Hale had been killed near here, but he was lying, Lasse. I could tell.”
Now the pressure in her ears was beginning. Like when a plane was about to land, only faster and stronger. She tried to yawn but couldn’t.
“What did they want with me? Does it have something to do with the one they wrote about in the newspapers? The cop from that new police department?” asked Lasse.
Because her ears were plugged, the voices sounded farther away, but she wanted to hear what they were saying. She wanted to hear everything.
The woman almost seemed to be whimpering now. “I just don’t know, Lasse,” she said over and over.
“Why do you think they’ll come back here?” he asked. “You told them I was at sea, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But, Lasse, they know which shipping line you work for. And they’ve heard about the van that comes here. The black one let it slip out, and it was obvious that the Danish cop was furious, you could see it. They probably already know that you haven’t been to sea for several months now. That you’re in the catering division instead. They’ll find out, Lasse, I know they will. Also that you send us the leftover food in a company van. All it takes is a phone call, Lasse, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Then they’ll come back. I think they just went to get a search warrant. They asked if they could take a look around.”
Merete held her breath. The police were coming back? With a search warrant? Is that what they thought? She looked at her bleeding wrist and pressed her thumb hard against the wound. The blood trickled out from underneath and pooled in the folds of her wrist, dripping slowly on to her lap. She wasn’t going to let go until she was convinced that the battle was lost. They would probably win, but right now they were feeling cornered. What a wonderful feeling it was.
The Keeper of Lost Causes Page 35
