A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “Yes.” She forced herself to giggle in as carefree a manner as possible. “It was easy, I’ve watched you do it loads of times.”

  “I didn’t think you knew where the charger was.”

  “Of course I do.” Now her hands were shaking. He knew something wasn’t right. Any second now he would ask where she had found that damned charger, and she had absolutely no idea where he kept it.

  Think! Think fast! Her mind raced.

  “Listen, I…” She raised her voice a notch. “Oh, Benjamin! Don’t do that!” She gave the boy a little shove with her foot, provoking him to make a sound. Then she glared at him harshly and nudged him again.

  When the question came—”Where did you find it, then?”—the child finally began to cry.

  “We’ll have to talk later,” she said, sounding concerned. “Benjamin’s hurt himself.”

  She snapped the mobile shut, crouched down, and pulled off the boy’s romper, showering him with kisses and comforting noises. “There, there, Benjamin. Mummy’s so sorry, so sorry. She didn’t mean it. Would you like a piece of cake?”

  The child sobbed and forgave her with a heavy nod, his big, sad eyes blinking. She thrust a picture book into his hands as the full extent of the catastrophe slowly manifested itself in her mind. The house they lived in was enormous, three hundred square meters, and the mobile charger could be in any place the size of a fist.

  An hour later, not a single drawer, cupboard, or shelf on the ground floor was left unsearched.

  And then it struck her: What if they only had the one charger? And what if he had taken it with him? Was his phone the same kind as hers? She didn’t even know.

  She fed the little boy, her brow furrowed with concern, and became convinced that that was indeed what had happened. He had taken the charger with him.

  She shook her head and scraped the boy’s lips clean with the spoon. But no, when you bought a mobile there was always a charger to go with it. Of course there was. Which meant there was a good chance that somewhere in the house there was a box that had come with the phone, containing a manual and most likely an unused charger. It just wasn’t on the ground floor, that’s all.

  She glanced at the stairs leading to the first floor.

  There were places in this house she almost never went. Not because he forbade her, but because that’s how it was. Correspondingly, he hardly ever entered her sewing room. They had their own interests, their own oases, and their own time to spend alone, albeit his freedom was the greater.

  She sat the child on her hip and went up the stairs, pausing at the door of his office. If she found the box with the charger in one of his drawers or cupboards, how would she then explain her presence in his domain?

  She pushed open the door.

  In contrast to her own room across the landing, his was devoid of all energy, lacking the zest of color and creative thought so characteristic of her own space. This was a place of gray and off-white surfaces, and very little else.

  She opened the built-in cupboards one by one, staring in at what amounted to nothing. Had the cupboards been hers, she would have been overwhelmed by tearstained diaries and accumulated mementoes, collected and saved to remind her of happy days in the company of friends.

  But on the shelves here were only a few books piled up in small stacks. Books to do with work. Books on firearms and policing, that sort of thing. And then a pile on religious sects. On the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Children of God, the Mormons, and others she had never heard of. Odd, she thought briefly, before standing on tiptoe to see whatever might be on the top shelves.

  There was hardly a thing.

  She opened the desk drawers one by one. Apart from a gray sharpening stone of the kind her father always used to hone his fishing knife, nothing caught her attention. The drawers contained paper, rubber stamps, and a couple of unopened boxes of floppy disks for the computer, the kind no one used anymore.

  She closed the door behind her, all her emotions frozen. At this moment she knew neither her husband nor herself. It was frightening and unreal at the same time. Like nothing she had experienced before.

  She felt the child’s head loll on her shoulder, his breath steady against her neck.

  “Oh, Mummy’s little boy. Did you fall asleep?” she whispered as she laid him down in his cot. She had to be careful not to lose control now. Everything had to proceed as normal.

  She picked up the phone and called the day care. “Benjamin has a cold; it wouldn’t be fair to the others if I brought him in today. Sorry for leaving it so late,” she said mechanically, forgetting to say thanks when the day-care assistant wished him a speedy recovery.

  That done, she turned toward the landing and stared at the narrow door between her husband’s office and their bedroom. She had helped him lug box upon box of stuff up the stairs into that little room. The main difference between the two of them had been one of ballast. She had come from her student accommodation with an absolute minimum of lightweight furniture from IKEA, whereas he came with everything he had amassed during the twenty years that made up the age gap between them. That was why their home was a jumble of furniture styles from different periods, and the room behind the door was filled with packing cases whose contents remained a mystery to her.

  She almost lost heart as soon as she opened the door and peered inside. Though the room was less than a meter and a half in width, the space was still sufficient to contain packing cases stacked three wide and four high. She managed to peer over the top and could see the Velux skylight at the other end. In total, there were at least fifty boxes.

  “Mainly stuff belonging to my parents and grandparents,” he had said. A lot of it could be chucked out once they got sorted. He was an only child, so no one else would kick up a fuss.

  She stood staring at the wall of boxes, feeling overwhelmed. It wouldn’t make sense to keep a charger in there. This was a room for the past.

  But then again…Her eyes settled on the overcoats that had been thrown into a heap on top of the rearmost boxes. Were they covering something? Might what she was looking for be hidden underneath?

  She reached as far as she could but to no avail. Eventually, she pulled herself up onto the cardboard mountain, dug in with her knees, and managed to crawl forward a little. She tugged at the coats, only to discover with disappointment that they concealed nothing. And then her knee went through the lid of the packing case on which most of her weight was resting.

  Shit, she thought to herself. Now he would know she had been up to something.

  She wriggled backward, pulled the flap up, and noted that no damage had been done.

  That was when she saw the newspaper cuttings inside. They weren’t that old, hardly something her husband’s parents had been saving. It was odd that he should have gathered together so many cuttings, but perhaps it was part of some hobby of his that had since been forgotten.

  “Just as well,” she muttered under her breath. But what possible interest could he have in articles about Jehovah’s Witnesses?

  She sifted through them. The material was by no means as homogeneous as she had first thought. Among articles on various sects, there were also cuttings about stock prices and market analyses, DNA tracking, even fifteen-year-old ads and prospectuses for holiday cabins and weekend homes for sale in Hornsherred. It was hard to imagine what use he could have for it all now. Maybe she ought to ask him if it wasn’t about time they got this room sorted out. The space would make an excellent walk-in wardrobe, and who wouldn’t like one of those?

  She slid down from the packing cases with a sense of relief. Now she had a new idea in mind.

  Just to make sure, she allowed her gaze to pass over the cardboard landscape one more time, finding no reason to be worried about the slight dent her knee had made in the box in the middle. He wouldn’t notice anything.

  And then she closed the door.

  The idea was that she would buy a new charger. She would do it now, using some of the houseke
eping money she had been putting aside unbeknown to her husband. She would cycle to the Sonofon store on Algade and buy a new one. And when she got home, she would make it look used by rubbing it in Benjamin’s sandpit so that it became scuffed and scratched, and then she would put it in the basket in the hall with Benjamin’s beanie hat and mittens, and produce it next time her husband asked.

  Of course, he was going to wonder where it had come from, and she would naturally be perplexed that he should wonder so. And then she would suggest that perhaps it had been left behind by someone visiting, and that it might not be theirs at all.

  She would recall the occasions other people had been in the house. It had been known to happen, though not for some considerable time now. There was the meeting of the residents’ association. Benjamin’s health visitor. In theory, certainly, someone could quite conceivably have left a phone charger behind, even if it did seem a bit odd, because who on earth would have such a thing with them in someone else’s house?

  She could easily pop out and buy a new one while Benjamin was having his afternoon nap. She smiled quietly at the thought of her husband’s astonishment when he asked to see the charger and she would pick it out from among the mittens in the basket. She repeated the sentence over and over in her mind so as to give it the right weight and emphasis.

  “What do you mean it’s not ours? What an odd thing to happen. Someone must have left it behind. One of the guests from the christening, perhaps?”

  It was a straightforward explanation. Simple, and so unlikely as to be foolproof.

  8

  If Carl had ever been in doubt as to whether Rose could keep a promise, he certainly wasn’t now. Hardly had he presumed to raise his weary voice in protest against her preposterous project of deciphering the message in the bottle than her eyes grew wide and she announced that in that case he could take his sodding bottle, regardless of it being in pieces, and shove it up his fucking arse.

  Before he even had time to protest further, she had slung her scruffy bag over her shoulder and stormed off. Even Assad was in a state of shock, standing for a moment as though nailed to the floor, a hunk of grapefruit jammed between his teeth.

  And thus they remained in silence for quite some time.

  “I wonder if she really will send her sister,” Assad finally ventured. His lips moved in slow motion, returning the grapefruit inelegantly to his hand.

  “Where’s your prayer mat, Assad?” Carl growled. “Be a sport and pray it doesn’t happen.”

  “A sport?”

  “A mate, a good bloke, Assad.”

  Carl gestured for him to step closer to the gigantic blowup that covered the partition wall. “Come on, we’ll get this out of the way before she gets back.”

  “We?”

  Carl nodded in acknowledgment. “You’re right, Assad. Best you do it yourself. Move it all on to the other wall next to your string and all those cases you’ve been sorting out. Just make sure there’s some space in between, OK?”

  Carl sat for a while, considering the original message with a certain degree of attention. Though it had by now passed through a number of hands, and not all of them had treated the material as possible evidence in a criminal investigation, it never even occurred to him not to bother wearing his white cotton gloves.

  The paper was so very fragile. Sitting alone with it now gave rise to a quite singular feeling. Marcus called it instinct. In Bak’s terminology it was “nous.” His soon-to-be ex-wife would say it was intuition, a word she could hardly pronounce. But whatever the fuck it was, this little handwritten letter set all his senses alight. Its authenticity was glaringly obvious. Penned in haste, most likely on a poor surface. Written in blood with the aid of some indeterminable instrument. A pen, dipped in blood? No, the strokes seemed too irregular for that. In some places it was as if the writer had pressed too hard, elsewhere not hard enough. He picked up a magnifying glass and tried to get a feeling for the paper’s irregularities, but the document was simply in too poor a state. What once had been an indentation the damp had most likely turned into a blister, and vice versa.

  He saw Rose’s brooding face in his mind’s eye and put the document aside. When she returned in the morning, he would give her the rest of the week to grapple with it. Then if nothing transpired, they would have to move on.

  He thought about getting Assad to brew him a cup of that sickly sweet goo of his, only to deduce from the mutterings in the corridor that he hadn’t yet finished cursing over having to run up and down the ladder and keep shifting it all the time. Carl wondered whether he should tell him that there was another ladder exactly the same in the storeroom next to the Burial Club, but frankly he couldn’t be arsed. The man would be finished in an hour anyway.

  Carl stared at the old case file concerning the arson in Rødovre. Once he had read through it one last time, he would have to kick it upstairs to the chief so he could file it on top of the alp of cases that already towered on his desk.

  An arson in Rødovre in 1995. The newly renovated tiled roof of a select whitewashed premises on Damhusdalen had suddenly collapsed in on itself and the blaze had consumed the entire upper floor in seconds. In the smoldering ruins a man’s body had been found. The owner of the property had no idea whose corpse it was, though a couple of neighbors were able to confirm that lights had been on in the attic windows all night. Since the body remained unclaimed, it was assumed the victim had been some intruding derelict who had failed to exercise proper care with the gas appliance in the kitchenette. Only when the gas company informed police that the main line into the house had been shut off was the case turned over to the Rødovre Police’s homicide section, where it languished in the filing cabinet until the day Department Q was brought into being. There, it might quite conceivably have led an equally anonymous existence had it not been for Assad latching on to that groove in the bone of the little finger on the victim’s left hand.

  Carl reached for his phone. He pressed the number of the homicide chief, only to wind up with the misery-inducing voice of Ms. Sørensen instead.

  “Very briefly, Ms. Sørensen,” he began, “how many cases—”

  “Is that you, Mørck? Let me put you through to someone who doesn’t cringe at the mention of your name.”

  One of these days he would make her a gift of some lethally poisonous animal.

  “Hello, darling,” came the sound of Lis’s buoyant voice.

  Thank Christ for that. Apparently, Ms. Sørensen was not entirely lacking in compassion.

  “Can you tell me how many victims have actually been identified in these recent arsons? In fact, how many arsons have we got now, altogether?”

  “The most recent, you mean? There are three, and we’ve barely established the identity of one of them.”

  “Barely?”

  “Well, we’ve got the first name from a medallion he was wearing, but apart from that we don’t actually know who he is. We might even be wrong on the first name.”

  “OK. Tell me again where the fires were.”

  “Haven’t you read the files?”

  “Only sort of.” He exhaled sharply. “One of them was in Rødovre in 1995, I know that. And you’ve got, what…?”

  “One last Saturday on Stockholmsgade, one the day after in Emdrup, and the last one so far in the Nordvest district.”

  “Stockholmsgade? Sounds upmarket. Do you happen to know which of the buildings was most damaged?”

  “Nordvest, I think. The address was Dortheavej.”

  “Has any link been established between these fires? What about the owners? Renovation work? Neighbors noticing lights on in the night? Terrorism?”

  “None, as far as I know. There’s loads of people on the case, though. You should ask one of them.”

  “Thanks, Lis. And I would, but it’s not my case, is it?”

  He added some resonance to his voice in the hope of making an impression, then dropped the folder back on the desk. Seems like they know what they’re doin
g, he thought to himself. But now there were voices in the corridor outside. Most likely those fucking sticklers from Health and Safety had come back to have another go at them.

  “Yes, his office is just there,” he heard Assad’s traitorous voice croak.

  Carl fixed his eyes on a fly buzzing around the room. If he timed it right, he might be able to swat it in the face of that obsequious worm from Health and Safety.

  He positioned himself behind the door with the Rødovre folder raised at the ready.

  But the face that appeared was one he had never seen before.

  “Hello,” the visitor said, extending a hand. “Yding’s the name. Inspector. Copenhagen West, Albertslund.”

  Carl nodded. “Yding? Would that be your first name or last?”

  The man smiled. Maybe he wasn’t sure himself.

  “I’m here about these latest arsons. It was me who assisted Antonsen in the Rødovre investigation in 1995. Marcus Jacobsen said he wanted to be briefed in person. He told me to have a word with you so you could introduce me to your assistant.”

  Carl heaved a sigh of relief. “You just met him. He’s the one climbing about on the ladder out there.”

  Yding narrowed his eyes. “The guy I just spoke to, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Won’t he do? He took his exams in New York, then all sorts of special training with Scotland Yard in DNA and image analysis.”

  Yding rose to the bait and nodded respectfully.

  “Assad, come here a minute, will you?” Carl yelled, taking a sudden swat with the Rødovre folder at the fly.

  He introduced Yding and Assad to each other.

  “Are you finished putting those photocopies up?” he asked.

  Assad’s eyelids drooped. Enough said.

  “Marcus Jacobsen tells me the original file on the Rødovre case is with you,” said Yding as he shook Assad’s hand. “He said you’d know where it was.”

  Assad pointed toward the folder in Carl’s hand at the same instant that Carl was about to have another go at the fly. “That’s it there,” he said. “Was that all?” He was most certainly not on form today. All that carry-on with Rose had put a damper on him.