A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  The smell of peppermint thickened the air. “You will most definitely like this tea,” said Assad as he poured. “It will do wonders for all sorts of things.” He grasped his crotch and winked. The message was abundantly clear.

  Laursen switched on another Anglepoise lamp and drew the light up close to the document.

  “Do we know who preserved this?”

  “A lab in Scotland,” Assad replied. He produced the investigation sheet before Carl had even remembered where he had put it.

  “The analysis is here.” Assad placed it in front of Laursen.

  “OK,” said Laursen after a few minutes. “I see it was Douglas Gilliam who took care of business there.”

  “You know him?”

  Laursen gave Carl the kind of look a five-year-old girl would when asked if she knew who Britney Spears was. Hardly respectful, but certainly enough to kindle Carl’s curiosity. Who was this Douglas Gilliam when he was at home, apart from some bloke on the wrong side of the border with England?

  “You’re not likely to get very far on this,” said Laursen, picking up his cup of peppermint tea between a thick finger and thumb. “Our Scottish colleagues seem to have done everything in their power to preserve the paper and recover the text by means of various forms of light treatment and chemicals. They’ve found minute traces of printer’s ink, but as far as I can see nothing’s been done to determine the origins of the paper itself. In fact, most of the physical investigation seems to be down to us. Have you run this through the Center of Forensic Services out in Vanløse?”

  “No, but then I had no idea the technical investigations were incomplete,” said Carl reluctantly. The mistake was his.

  “It says so here.” Laursen indicated the bottom line of the lab report.

  Why the hell hadn’t he noticed that? Shit!

  “Actually, Carl, Rose did tell me this. But she did not think we needed to know where the paper came from,” Assad chipped in.

  “Well, on that count she was most certainly wrong. Let me have another look.” Laursen got up and squeezed his fingers into his pocket. It was no easy task. Rugby thighs in tight jeans.

  The type of magnifying glass Laursen now produced was one Carl had seen on many occasions. A small square that could be folded out to stand on top of the object. It looked like the lower part of a little microscope. Standard issue for stamp collectors and similar loonies, but the professional version, equipped with the finest of Zeiss lenses, was most certainly a must for a forensics expert such as Laursen.

  He placed it on the document, muttering to himself as he drew the lens across the lines of mostly obliterated writing. He worked systematically from side to side, one line at a time.

  “Can you see more characters through that glass?” Assad inquired.

  Laursen shook his head but said nothing.

  By the time he was halfway through the document, Carl was dying for a smoke.

  “Just nipping out for a sec, OK?”

  His words were hardly noticed.

  He sat down on one of the tables in the corridor and stared blankly at all the equipment they had standing around idle. Scanners, copy machines, and the like. The thought annoyed him. Another time, he would have to make sure Rose finished what she was doing before she dropped everything and split. Poor leadership on his part.

  It was at this very moment of painful self-awareness that a series of dull thuds suddenly came from the stairs, making him think of a basketball bouncing down a flight of steps in slow motion, followed by a wheelbarrow with a flat tire. He gawped as a person came toward him looking like a housewife who had just stocked up on duty-frees from the ferries that used to ply the Øresund to Sweden. The high-heeled shoes, the pleated tartan skirt, and the garish shopping cart she dragged in her wake all screamed the fifties more than the fifties probably ever did themselves. And at the upper extremity of this gangling individual was a clone of Rose’s head topped with the neatest peroxide perm imaginable. It was like suddenly being in a film with Doris Day and not knowing how to get out.

  In a situation like this, a person smoking a filterless ciggie will invariably end up burning his fingers.

  “Ow, fuck!” he spluttered, dropping the end on the floor in front of the colorful newcomer.

  “Yrsa Knudsen,” she announced, extending a pair of fingers toward him, her nails painted as red as blood.

  Never for the life of him would he have believed that twins could be so similar and yet so different.

  He had reckoned on taking control from the word go, and yet here he was fawningly answering her inquiry as to the whereabouts of her office: “Down the corridor past all those sheets of paper flapping on the wall there.” He completely forgot what he had been intending to say: his name and rank, and then a reprimand that the situation she and her sister had contrived was entirely against regulations and must cease forthwith.

  “I’m expecting a briefing once I’ve got settled in. Let’s say in an hour, shall we?” And off she went.

  “What was that, Carl?” Assad asked as Carl stepped back into his office.

  Carl glared at him. “I’ll tell you what it was, Assad. It was a problem. More specifically, it was your problem. In an hour from now, I want you to put Rose’s sister in the picture as to what’s on our desk. Are you with me?”

  “So that was Yrsa, the lady who walked past?”

  Carl closed his eyes in confirmation. “Are you with me? You’re going to brief her, Assad.”

  And then he turned to Laursen, who had now almost finished examining the document. “Anything turning up there?”

  Laursen, forensics expert turned purveyor of French fries, nodded and indicated something invisible to the human eye that he had apparently placed on a microscope slide.

  Carl stuck his head up close. OK, there did seem to be what looked like the tip of a hair, and next to it something tiny, round, and flat, and otherwise almost transparent.

  “That’s a splinter of wood,” Laursen said, pointing at the hairlike fragment. “My guess is it came from the point of the writing instrument used by whoever wrote the letter. It was lodged quite deeply and lay in the direction of the pen. The other thing’s a fish scale.”

  He straightened up from his rather awkward position and rolled his shoulders. “Perhaps we’ll get somewhere with this after all, Carl. But we need to get it off to Vanløse first, OK? They should be able to determine the wood type relatively quickly, but finding out what kind of fish that scale belongs to is more likely a job for a marine scientist.”

  “Highly interesting,” said Assad. “This is a very well-endowed colleague we have here, Carl.”

  Well-endowed? Did he really say that?

  Carl scratched his cheek. “What more can you say about this, Laursen? Was there anything else?”

  “Well, I can’t tell whether the person who wrote it is right- or left-handed, which is quite unusual in cases where the paper is as porous as this. Usually, you can pick out raised areas all going in a certain direction. For that reason we might assume that the letter was written under difficult circumstances. Perhaps against an uneven surface, or with hands that were tied. Maybe just by someone unpracticed in writing. Besides that, my bet is that the paper was used to wrap fish in. As far as I can see, it’s got traces of slime all over it, most likely from a fish. We know the bottle was watertight, so it won’t be from having been in the sea. As for those shadowy areas there, I’m not sure. It could be nothing. Mold, perhaps, or more probably just stains from being inside the bottle.”

  “Interesting! What about the message itself? Do you think it’s worth pursuing, or is it simply some prank?”

  “A prank?” Laursen retracted his upper lip to reveal two slightly crossed front teeth. It did not mean he was laughing, but simply that whoever was listening would do well to prick up his ears. “I can see indentations in the paper showing the handwriting to be rather unsteady. The splinter we’ve got here drew a narrow, rather deep scratch across the paper unti
l it broke off. In places it’s so sharply done you’d think it was a groove on a vinyl LP.” He shook his head. “So no, definitely not a prank. It looks more like it was written by someone whose hand was shaking. Again due to the circumstances, perhaps, but conceivably because the person was scared to death. So my instinct says yes, this is serious. Of course, you can never tell for sure.”

  At this point, Assad interrupted. “When you look so close at the letters and the scratches, can you see more letters?”

  “One or two, maybe. But only up to where the point breaks off the writing instrument.”

  Assad handed him a copy of the message he and Rose had blown up and stuck to the wall in the corridor.

  “Will you not then write the ones you think are missing here?” he said.

  Laursen nodded and placed the magnifying glass against the original letter once again. After studying the first couple of lines for another few minutes, he said: “Well, this is my take on it, without putting my head on the block.”

  And then he added figures and letters of the alphabet, so that the first lines of the message now ran:

  HELP

  .he .6 febrary 1996 w. …. k..naped .. got .s .t the .us sdop on .aut.opv… i. Bal… u.—T.. man .. 18. t.ll …h …r. hair

  They stood for a moment and considered the result until Carl broke their silence.

  “February 1996! That means the bottle was in the sea for six years before it got caught up in that net.”

  Laursen nodded. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure about the year, but the nines were back to front.”

  “That’d be why the Scots couldn’t work it out.”

  Laursen shrugged. Maybe.

  Beside them, Assad stood frowning.

  “What’s up, Assad?” Laursen asked.

  “It is just as I thought. Very bad shit, indeed,” he sighed, indicating three of the words.

  Carl scrutinized the letter.

  “If we cannot find more characters in the last part of the letter, then our job will be very, very difficult,” Assad went on.

  And now Carl saw what he meant. Of all people on earth, it had fallen to Assad to recognize the full extent of the problem. A man who had lived in the country for no more than a few years. No one would credit it.

  Febrary, kidnaped and bus sdop.

  Whoever wrote the letter couldn’t spell.

  11

  They hardly heard a peep from Yrsa in Rose’s office. It was a good sign indeed. If she carried on like that, they could send her off home again in a couple of days and Rose would have to come back.

  They needed the money, Yrsa had said.

  Since the archive contained no information about any kidnapping in February 1996, Carl went back to the arson file and called up Antonsen, the superintendent out in Rødovre. Rather go to an old hand than an office boy like Yding. Why on earth the useless oaf hadn’t made a note in the report about the financial state of the arson-hit Rødovre company was beyond his comprehension. In Carl’s opinion it was tantamount to dereliction of duty. Moreover, the gas company had told them they had turned off the mains, so how come the place went up like it did? As long as questions like these were left dangling, anyone with a brain could see they were dealing with a possible murder, and in that case everything had to be considered.

  “Well, here’s a turnup for the books,” said Antonsen when Carl’s call was put through. “To what do we owe the honor of speaking to Carl Mørck himself, expert in blowing dust off antique case files?” he chuckled. “Have you found out who did away with the Grauballe Man?”

  “Yeah, and we’ve nailed Jack the Ripper, too,” Carl rejoined. “What’s more, we might have one of your own cases cleared up soon. Looks that way, at least.”

  Antonsen laughed. “I know what you’re getting at, I spoke to Marcus Jacobsen only yesterday,” he replied. “You’ll be wanting to know about that fire in 1995, I suppose. Haven’t you read the report?”

  Carl repressed the urge to splutter some invective, knowing too well that Antonsen would respond in kind, swiftly and quite as incisively. “I have, yeah. And that report reads like something the cat dragged in. Would one of your lads be responsible?”

  “Come off it, Carl. Yding did some fine work on that case. What do you need to know?”

  “Details on the company that owned the premises. Important details completely ignored in this fine work Yding’s supposed to have done.”

  “All right, I thought it might be something along those lines. And as it happens, we do have something here. There was an audit done on that firm a couple of years later, resulting in a charge being preferred against them. It never amounted to anything, but it did give us some more insight into their affairs. Do you want me to fax it over, or would you prefer me to come crawling and place it before your feet at the throne?”

  Carl laughed. Colleagues who could parry Carl’s bollockings as disarmingly as Antonsen were few and far between.

  “I’m on my way over now, Anton. Get the coffee on.”

  Antonsen hung up with a groan.

  Carl sat for a moment and stared at the flatscreen on the wall showing another of the news channel’s endless loops on the shooting of Mustafa Hsownay, another innocent victim who happened to get in the way of the continuing gang war. Now, it seemed, police had given the go-ahead for his coffin to be paraded through the city streets. Certain jingoist flag-wavers he could think of would be choking on their bacon.

  Then came a grunt from the door opening. “I’m waiting for something to do.”

  Carl gave a start. It wasn’t the custom in the basement for people to go sneaking about without a sound. And if gangly Yrsa Knudsen could move with such stealth one minute and then sound like a herd of stampeding gnu the next, he was going to end up a nervous wreck in no time.

  She swatted at something in the air. “Ugh, a fly. I hate those things, they’re disgusting.”

  Carl followed the insect with his eyes and wondered what it had been up to since last time they’d seen each other. He picked up a case folder from the desk. Splattering time.

  “I’m settled in now. Do you want to come and have a look?” Yrsa asked in a voice that sounded uncannily like Rose’s.

  Would he like to come and have a look? Nothing could interest him less.

  For a moment he forgot all about his winged adversary and turned to face her.

  “Did you say you needed something to do? Just as well, because that’s why you’re here. You can start by calling the Business Authority. Get them to send us the last five annual reports for K. Frandsen Wholesalers, Public Consult, and JPP Fittings A/S. Then have a look at their credit facilities and short-term loans. OK?” He wrote the three company names down on a piece of notepaper.

  Yrsa looked at him as though he’d suggested something indecent. “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  This did not bode well.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s a lot easier to do it online. Who wants to hang around on the phone all day?”

  Carl struggled to ignore his ego crying for help from beneath the heel of her shoe. Maybe he should give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “Carl, look at this,” said Assad, appearing in the doorway, then stepping aside to allow Yrsa to get past.

  “I have been studying it for a long time now,” he went on, placing the photocopied letter on the desk in front of Carl. “What do you think? I found myself unable to escape the thought that it said ‘Ballerup’ there in the second line, and then I looked in the street atlas and searched through all the road names in Ballerup. I discovered that the only one to fit the word just in front of the ‘i’ is called Lautrupvang. The writer of the letter has written ‘Lautrop’ with an ‘o,’ but we know now that his spelling was very poor.”

  For a brief moment Assad’s gaze locked on to the fly buzzing around below the ceiling. Then he looked at Carl.

  “What do you think, Carl? Could it be like this?” He indicated the relevant
passage in the photocopy. It now ran:

  HELP

  The .6 febrary 1996 we were kidnaped he got us at the bus sdop on Lautropvang in Ballerup—The man is 18. tall …h …r. hair

  Carl nodded. It all seemed rather likely, no question about that. In which case, they should get their noses into the archive without delay.

  “You nod, Carl. You think this is right. Oh, that is good,” Assad exclaimed and almost threw himself over the desk to plant a kiss on Carl’s forehead.

  Carl recoiled and looked daggers at him. Sticky cakes and sweet tea were acceptable. But emotional outbursts of this Middle Eastern dimension was taking things to extremes.

  “Now, we know the date to be either the sixteenth or the twenty-sixth of February in 1996,” Assad went on unabashed. “We also know the place, and that the kidnapper is a man who is more than one hundred and eighty centimeters tall. Now we need the last words in the line, which are having something to do with his hair.”

  “Indeed, Assad. Plus the small matter of sixty-five percent of the rest of the letter,” said Carl.

  Apart from that, Assad’s theory seemed to be sound.

  Carl grabbed the document, jumped to his feet, and went out into the corridor to look at the blowup on the wall. If he had imagined Yrsa at this moment to be busy plowing through the annual reports of the three firms that had been hit by arson, he could think again. Here she was, standing in the middle of the corridor absorbing the magnified message in front of her.

  “It’s OK, Yrsa, this is something we’re taking care of,” said Carl. Yrsa didn’t budge.

  Cognizant of behavioral likenesses among twins, Carl elected simply to shrug and leave well alone. Sooner or later she would presumably succumb to a stiff neck, the way she was standing.

  Carl and Assad stood next to her. Looking at Assad’s suggested text and comparing it with the version on the wall, Carl found that faint and yet plausible corroborations, hitherto unseen, somehow seemed to present themselves.