A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

In fact, Assad’s take on the first few lines appeared more than credible.

  “Well, it looks right to me,” he said, then sent Assad off to check once again whether any crime had been reported that could even remotely be linked to a case of kidnapping on Lautrupvang in Ballerup in 1996.

  Most likely Assad would be able to report back by the time Carl returned from Rødovre.

  Antonsen was sitting in the cramped space of his office. The place reeked of banned pipe tobacco and cigarillos. No one ever saw him smoke, though undeniably he did. Rumor had it he remained on the job until the office staff went home just so he could light up in peace. It was years since his wife had proclaimed that he had finally stopped for good. Apparently, she was oblivious.

  “Here’s the report on the company on Damhusdalen,” said Antonsen, handing him a plastic folder. “Like it says on the first page, they’re an import-export company whose partners were registered in the former Yugoslavia. So they were probably faced with a difficult transition when the war broke out in the Balkans and everything fell apart at the seams.

  “These days, Amundsen and Mujagic A/S is a flourishing business, but when it burned down, they hit bottom financially. At the time, we had no reason to believe the company was anything less than aboveboard, and that basically would still be our standpoint today. But if you’ve got anything to add in that respect, you’re more than welcome.”

  “Amundsen and Mujagic. Mujagic’s a Yugoslavian name, right?” Carl ventured.

  “Yugoslavian, Croatian, Serbian. Same difference if you ask me. I don’t think there’s an Amundsen or a Mujagic left in the company these days. You can check if you want.”

  Carl rocked gently in his chair and considered the man opposite him.

  Antonsen was an all-right policeman. He was a few years older than Carl and had always ranked above him, yet still they’d shared a lot of laughs and professional tussles, all of which had demonstrated that they were two of a kind.

  Woe betide anyone who blew his horn at their expense. Moreover, they were both immune to all forms of bullshit, backslapping, and corridor gossip. If anyone on the force, at least in the capital region, was utterly unsuited to diplomacy, political maneuvering, or siphoning public funds to meet their own professional ends, it was Carl Mørck and Antonsen. Which was why Antonsen had never risen to commissioner and Carl had amounted to sod all. Neither of them gave a shit.

  But now there was something niggling Carl. That fucking fire. And then, as now, Antonsen had been in charge of the shop.

  “My feeling on this,” said Carl, “is that the key to clearing up these recent arsons in Copenhagen lies in this blaze of yours in Rødovre. A body was found in the remains, and the bone of the little finger clearly indicated that the victim had worn a ring for a good many years. Exactly the same thing turns up again with the victims of these latest fires. So I need to know—and I want you to be frank with me on this, Anton—if you consider that case to have been properly handled at the time. I’m asking you straight out, you can tell me your answer and we’ll leave it at that. But I need to know, in view of the way you led the investigation at the time, and with the officers you had on the job. Did you have any personal dealings with that company? Is there anything at all at any point in time that links you to Amundsen and Mujagic A/S?”

  “Are you accusing me of acting unlawfully, Carl Mørck?” Antonsen’s eyes narrowed, and all the joviality of earlier fell away.

  “Not at all. I just can’t fathom how your boys never got around to establishing with one hundred percent certainty the cause of the blaze and the identity of the body that was found in the ruins.”

  “So you’re accusing me of obstructing my own investigation, is that it?”

  Carl looked Antonsen in the eye. “If you put it that way, I suppose I am. Am I right? Because if I am, it means I’ve got something to go on.”

  Antonsen handed Carl a bottle of Tuborg, which Carl kept in his hand until they were finished talking. Antonsen gulped down a mouthful of his own.

  The old fox wiped his mouth and thrust out his lower lip. “We weren’t alarmed by the case, Carl, if truth be told. A roof fire and an unlucky tramp, that’s how we looked at it. And to be honest, I suppose I allowed it all to slide. Not the way you’re thinking, though.”

  “How come, then?”

  “Because at the time, Lola was shagging someone else at the station, and I was drinking my way through the crisis.”

  “Lola?”

  “Believe it or not, yes. But listen, Carl. She and I pulled through. It’s all in the past, and everything’s fine now. But I will concede that I ought to have been more on the ball in that particular case.”

  “OK, Anton. That’s good enough for me. We’ll stop here.”

  Carl stood up and glanced at Antonsen’s pipe, lying there on its side like a boat stranded in a desert. In a moment or two, it would be sailing again. Office hours or not.

  “Oh, hang on a sec,” Antonsen said as Carl was halfway through the door. “One more thing. Remember last summer, that murder in one of the high-rises here in Rødovre? I said to you then that if you lot at HQ weren’t nice to Samir Ghazi, I’d personally make sure you wished you’d never heard of me. Now I hear Samir’s applying to come back to us.” He picked up his pipe and began to stroke it. “What’s the story there? Any idea? He’s not saying a word to me, but as far as I understand it Jacobsen’s been well pleased with him.”

  “He was your sergeant, wasn’t he? I’m afraid I haven’t got a clue. Hardly even know him.”

  “Well, I can tell you Department A are at a loss to understand it, too. Word is, though, that it has something to do with one of your lot.”

  Carl searched his mind. Why should it have anything to do with Assad? On the other hand, he’d been keeping away from Samir since day one. Why would Assad want to do that?

  Now it was Carl’s turn to thrust out his lower lip.

  “Well, I’ll ask around, but right now I wouldn’t know. Maybe Samir just misses working with his old boss?” He gave Antonsen a wink. “Say hello to Lola for me, eh?”

  He found Yrsa exactly where he had left her, in the middle of the corridor in front of Rose’s enormous blowup of the message in the bottle. Her face was pensive, and she was standing with one leg drawn up under her skirt like a flamingo, as if in a trance. Apart from the clothes, it was Rose all over. It was enough to put the wind up a bloke.

  “Have you been through those annual reports from the Business Authority?” he asked.

  She glanced at him absently, tapping her forehead with a pencil. He was by no means certain she had even registered his presence.

  He filled his lungs with air and discharged the question into her face for the second time. The batty woman gave a slight start, her only discernible reaction.

  Just as he was about to turn and go, shaking his head in total bewilderment as to what the blazes he was supposed to do with these decidedly original sisters, she began to speak, softly and yet with such clarity he could hear every word.

  “I’m good at Scrabble and crosswords and IQ tests and Sudoku, and I’m not bad at writing verse and occasional songs for confirmations and birthdays and wedding anniversaries. But this isn’t working for me at all.” She turned to face Carl. “Is it OK if you just leave me alone for a bit so I can have a think about this terrible letter?”

  Was it OK? She’d been standing there all the time he’d been to Rødovre and back again, and now she wanted him to leave her alone? Seriously, she could pack her gear back in that eyesore of a shopping cart of hers and wheel her tartan robes and bagpipes and all the rest of her junk back to Vanløse or wherever the hell it was she came from.

  “Listen, Yrsa,” he said, trying as best he could to be nice. “Either you get those reports back to me in the next twenty-seven minutes, annotated with notes for my guidance, or else I’ll have no option but to ask Lis from the third floor to write out a check on the spot for four hours of your totally superfluous pres
ence here. In which case, you would be wise not to be banking on any pension scheme. Am I making myself clear?”

  “My goodness, what a shitload of words, if you’ll excuse my French.” She beamed a smile at him. “Have I told you, by the way, how well that shirt suits you? Brad Pitt’s got one exactly the same.”

  Carl cast a glance down at his checked monstrosity from the Kvickly supermarket. All of a sudden, he felt strangely homeless in the basement.

  He withdrew into Assad’s so-called office to find the man with his feet up on the top drawer and the phone stuck to the blue-black stubble on his face. In front of him were ten pens, most likely now missing from Carl’s own office, and underneath them reams of paper filled with scribbled names and figures and Arabic friezes. He was speaking slowly and with remarkable clarity. His whole being exuded authority and composure, and in his hand was a Lilliputian cup of aromatic coffee. If Carl didn’t know better, he’d think he was in a travel agent’s office in Ankara, and the manager was in the process of chartering a jumbo jet for thirty-five oil sheiks.

  Assad turned to face him and sent him a crinkly smile.

  Apparently, he wanted to be left alone as well.

  It was like an epidemic.

  Perhaps the best thing in the circumstances would be a restorative snooze in his office chair. He could run a film on the inside of his eyelids about a fire in Rødovre and cross his fingers that the case had been solved by the time he opened them again.

  He had just settled into place with his feet on the desk when this alluring and life-prolonging plan was interrupted by the sound of Laursen’s voice.

  “Is there anything left of the bottle, Carl?” he asked.

  Carl blinked with surprise. “Bottle, what bottle?” Laursen’s food-stained apron gradually came into focus, and Carl returned his feet to the floor. “The bottle, yeah. Well, there’s three thousand five hundred pieces of it each the size of an ant’s dick in a plastic bag in the cupboard here, if that’s what you mean.”

  He produced the transparent bag, holding it up in front of Laursen’s face. “Would that be any good to you?”

  Laursen nodded and indicated a shard rather larger than the rest at the bottom of the bag.

  “I just spoke to Douglas Gilliam, the forensics man from Scotland. He advised me to take the biggest piece remaining of the bottle end and then have a DNA analysis done on the blood traces. That must be it there. The blood’s even visible.”

  Carl was about to ask if he could borrow Laursen’s magnifying glass, but found he could see without it. The blood was hardly there, and what little there was looked completely impoverished.

  “Didn’t they do that themselves?”

  “No, he says they only took samples from the letter itself. But he says we shouldn’t reckon on finding anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s so little of it to test, and because it’s likely to be too old. Besides, the climate inside the bottle and all that time in seawater would be highly detrimental to the genetic material. Heat and cold, and then maybe a drop or two of salt water. The changing light. It all points to the DNA having perished.”

  “Does DNA change as it’s broken down?”

  “No, it doesn’t change. It just deteriorates. But with all the adverse factors here, that might not make any difference in this case.”

  Carl considered the smidgeon of blood on the shard. “What if they do get a result? What good would it do us? We can’t identify a body because we haven’t got one. And we can’t compare the genetic material with that of relatives because we don’t know who they are. We don’t even know who wrote the letter, so I can’t see how it would help, to be honest.”

  “If we’re lucky, we can determine skin color, eye color, and hair color. Worth a go, wouldn’t you say?”

  Carl nodded. Laursen was right, no two ways about it. The people at the Department of Forensic Medicine’s Section of Forensic Genetics were amazing, he knew that. He had once attended a lecture given by the deputy head of the section. If anyone could determine whether the victim was lame, spoke with a lisp, or was a redheaded Greenlander from Thule, it was those guys.

  “Let’s give it a go,” said Carl. And then he gave Laursen a pat on the back. “I’ll be upstairs for a filet steak soon.”

  Laursen smiled. “You’ll have to bring it with you, then.”

  12

  Her name was Lisa, but she called herself Rachel. For seven years she had lived her life with a man who failed to make her pregnant. Weeks and months of infertility in mud huts, first in Zimbabwe, then in Liberia. Schoolrooms filled with wide ivory smiles lighting up the brown faces of the children, but also endless hours in negotiation with the local representatives of the NDPL and then eventually Charles Taylor’s guerrillas. Praying for peace was no help. This was not a place for which a young teacher out of the DNS International Teacher Training College had been able to prepare. There were too many pitfalls and evil intentions, but such was Africa.

  When she was raped by a passing group of NPFL soldiers, her boyfriend had not intervened. His passivity had forced her into taking matters into her own hands.

  For that reason it was over.

  The same evening, she had gone down on her bruised knees on the veranda and clasped her bloodied hands, and for the first time in her ungodly life she felt the kingdom of heaven to be truly at hand.

  “Forgive me, and please let there be no reprisals,” she prayed beneath the black sky of night. “Let there be no reprisals, and let me find a new life. A life of peace with a good man and many children. Please, God, I beg you.”

  The next morning, she was bleeding down below. She packed her suitcase and knew that God had heard her prayer. Her sins were forgiven.

  Her rescuers came from a small, recently established religious community in the town of Danané in neighboring Ivory Coast. There they were all of a sudden, benevolent faces on the A701 highway, offering her shelter after two weeks of following refugees along the highway to Baobli and farther on beyond the border. These were people who had seen great hardship and who knew that wounds need time to heal. From that moment, a new life unfolded. God had heard her prayer, and God had shown her the way.

  A year later, she was back in Denmark. Cleansed of the Devil and all his work, ready to find the man who would make her fertile.

  His name was Jens, later to be called Joshua. Her body was rich temptation to a man who had lived alone in the farmhouse he had inherited from his parents and from which he carried on the family business, hiring out agricultural machinery and equipment. Jens discovered the way of God in ecstasy between her thighs.

  Soon, the church on the edge of Viborg was two disciples richer, and ten months later she gave birth to their first child.

  Since then, the Mother of God had given her new life and been merciful to her. Josef, eighteen years old, Samuel, sixteen, Miriam, fourteen, Magdalena, twelve, and Sarah, ten, were the fruits. Exactly twenty-three months between each.

  The Mother of God took care of her own.

  Now she had seen the new man on several occasions in the Mother Church, and he had looked so kindly upon her and her children when they abandoned themselves in their songs of praise. Only blessed words had passed his lips. He seemed honest and kind, and to possess a depth of soul and character. A rather handsome man who would surely attract a fine, new woman into the Church.

  These were good signs, everyone agreed. Joshua called him worthy.

  When he came to the church that evening, for the fourth time, she felt certain he had come to stay. They offered him a room in the farmhouse, but he declined, explaining that he was staying elsewhere and was in the process of looking for a house in which to settle. However, he would be in the area for a few days and would find it a pleasure to look in on them if he should happen to pass by.

  So he was looking for a house, and this was the subject of much chatter in the Church, especially among the women. His hands were strong, he owned a v
an, and would be useful to his brethren. He appeared to be rather successful in life, and moreover was courteous and well dressed. A future pastor, perhaps. Or a missionary.

  They would be especially accommodating toward him.

  Only one day passed before he stood at their door. Unfortunately, it was a bad time. She was premenstrual and unwell, her head throbbing. All she wanted at that moment was for the children to be in their rooms and Joshua to attend to his business.

  But Joshua opened the door and ushered the man through to the oak table in the kitchen.

  “It might be the only chance we get,” he whispered, entreating her to rise from the sofa. “Fifteen minutes, that’s all, Rachel. Then you can lie down again.”

  With her thoughts on the Church and how welcome new blood would be, she stood up with her hand pressed against her abdomen and went out into the kitchen, confident in the belief that the Mother of God had meticulously chosen this moment to put her to the test. To let her know that her achings were but the touch of God’s hand. That her nausea was little else but the scorching sand of the desert. She was a disciple, and nothing physical could stand in the way of that.

  That was the whole point.

  And so she came out to greet him, her pale face wearing a smile, and asked him to sit down and accept the gifts of the Lord.

  He had been to Levring and Elsborg looking at cottages, he said from behind the steam rising from his coffee cup, and the day after tomorrow or Monday he would drive to Ranstrup and Resen to see a couple more that seemed promising.

  “Lord Jesus be praised!” Joshua exclaimed with an apologetic glance in her direction. She disliked him taking His name in vain.

  “Resen, you say?” he went on. “That wouldn’t be on the way out toward Sjørup Plantation, would it? Theodor Bondesen’s place? If it is, I can make sure you pay a fair price. It’s been empty for eight months, at least. Longer, even.”

  An odd look passed faintly over the man’s face. Joshua, of course, didn’t notice. But she did. It was out of place.