A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “Bridle our tongue, dear Lord” and “We no longer speak to Tryggve.” What was that supposed to mean? Was all mention of Tryggve forbidden? Or Poul, for that matter? Had both been ostracized following whatever it was that had happened? Had they shown themselves to be unworthy of the kingdom of God? Was that what this was all about?

  If it was, then it was no business of any officer of the law.

  What to do, he wondered. Should he get in touch with the Karlshamn police and ask for assistance? But on what grounds? The family hadn’t done anything they weren’t supposed to. At least, not as far as he could make out.

  He shook his head, walked silently away from the door, and got back in the car. He thrust the gear lever into reverse and backed slowly up the road, parking at a discreet distance from the house.

  Removing the lid from his thermos, he found the contents to be stone cold. Brilliant. The last time he had done a stakeout at night had been ten years earlier, and he had been equally reluctant. Damp March nights in a car without a decent headrest, sipping stone-cold coffee from a plastic thermos lid wasn’t exactly what he’d been dreaming of when he’d taken the chance and moved on to Copenhagen Police HQ. And now here he was. Without a clue, apart from this maddening, matter-of-fact instinct of his that told him how to read people’s reactions and what they might lead to.

  This man in the house on the hill had not reacted naturally. That much was clear to him. Martin Holt had been just a bit too dismissive, too gray in the face, too insensitive in speaking of his two eldest sons. And too uninterested in what a detective of the Copenhagen police might be doing in this rocky neck of the woods. It wasn’t what people said but rather what they didn’t say that gave the game away when they were hiding something. And that was definitely the case here.

  He stared ahead toward the house on the bend, then wedged his coffee cup between his thighs. He would close his eyes now. Power napping, they called it.

  Two minutes, that would be enough, he thought to himself, only to wake up twenty minutes later when he became aware that his genitals were being refrigerated by cold coffee.

  “Bollocks!” he blurted out loud, flapping at the icy liquid seeping into his trousers. He repeated the utterance a moment later as the headlights of a car swept away from the house and down the road toward Ronneby.

  He let the coffee soak into the seat cover and threw the car into gear. The night was dark. Once they were out of Hallabro, only the stars and the car ahead of him stuck out in the pitch black.

  They drove ten, maybe fifteen kilometers until the beam of the headlights struck a hideously yellow house on the brow of a hill, built so close to the road that it seemed even a moderate breath of wind might be enough for the ramshackle construction to make a mess of the traffic.

  The car turned in and remained in the driveway. After ten minutes, Carl left his Peugeot at the side of the road and cautiously approached the house, sideways like a crab.

  Only now did he realize that there were passengers in the car. Motionless and barely visible. Four figures of various sizes.

  He waited a few moments, taking note of the surroundings. Quite apart from its color, garish even in darkness, the house was hardly encouraging to look at.

  Scrap metal, assorted junk, and machinery no longer in use lay everywhere. It looked like the owner had died years ago and the place had been left to fall apart.

  A far cry from the family’s elegant abode in Græsted, Carl thought to himself, his gaze following the headlights of a fast-moving car that swept up the hill from the direction of Ronneby, the beam illuminating the gable end of the house and the yard. For a brief second, a mother’s face, swollen with tears, was made visible through the window of the parked car, and a young woman and two teenagers on the backseat. Everyone in the vehicle seemed to be affected by the situation. They were silent yet clearly upset, their faces filled with fright.

  Carl moved forward to the side of the house and put his ear to the rotten wooden cladding. Close up, he could see that only the paint seemed to be keeping the place together.

  Inside, words were being exchanged. Two men were arguing, and were obviously far from reaching agreement. The voices were harsh and irreconcilable. It was a shouting match.

  When they stopped, Carl hardly had time to catch sight of the man as he slammed the door behind him and almost threw himself into the driver’s seat of the waiting car.

  There was a squeal of tires as the Holt family frenziedly reversed onto the road and tore off in a southerly direction. Carl had already made up his mind.

  This ugly yellow house was whispering to him.

  And he was all ears.

  The nameplate read Lillemor Bengtsen, but the woman who opened the yellow door was nothing like the little housewife the name suggested. In her early twenties, with blond hair and slightly overlapping front teeth, she was quite simply adorable, as they used to say in another age.

  Maybe Sweden wasn’t that bad, after all.

  “I think perhaps you might be expecting me.” He produced his badge. “Would Poul Holt be here, by any chance?”

  She shook her head but smiled. For all the ferocity of the disagreement that had just taken place, she had apparently kept herself well out of it.

  “How about Tryggve, then?”

  “You’d better come in!” she said briskly in Swedish, then indicated a closed door farther inside the house.

  “He’s here, Tryggve,” she called into the living room. “I’m going to lie down, OK?”

  She smiled at Carl as though they knew each other, then left him alone with her boyfriend.

  He was tall and almost painfully thin, but then what had Carl been expecting? He extended his hand and received a firm handshake in response.

  “Tryggve Holt,” the young man said by way of introduction. “My father was here to warn me.”

  Carl nodded. “My impression was you two weren’t on speaking terms?”

  “We’re not. I’m an outcast now. I haven’t spoken to them for four years, but I’ve often seen them parked outside on the road.”

  His eyes were calm. They bore no trace of the altercation such a short time ago and seemed unconcerned by the present situation. So Carl went straight to the point.

  “We found a message in a bottle,” he said, noting an immediate flicker in the man’s impassive face. “Actually, it turned up in a fishing net off the coast of Scotland some years back, though it only came into our hands at Police Headquarters in Copenhagen a week or so ago.”

  Now the reaction was more visible, if not to say undeniable, and what had triggered it were the four words: message in a bottle. As though all these years they had been at the back of his mind. Perhaps he had been waiting for someone to utter them. Perhaps they were the password to all the mysteries that remained inside him.

  He bit his lip. “A message in a bottle, you say?”

  “Yes, perhaps you’d like to see it.” He handed the young man a copy of the letter.

  In the space of two seconds, Tryggve shrank to three-quarters of his size, twisting around on his own axis and knocking everything within reach to the floor. Had it not been for Carl’s quick reflexes, he would have been knocked over in the same way.

  “What’s going on?” It was the girlfriend, standing in the doorway with her hair untied, clad in a T-shirt that only just covered her naked thighs. Already on her way to bed.

  Carl indicated the letter.

  She picked it up, glanced through the contents, and handed it to her boyfriend.

  Then no one spoke for several minutes.

  When eventually he regained some composure, the young man glanced at the document as though it were a dangerous animal that might pounce at any moment and finish him off for good. As though his only defense was to read it again, word for word.

  Lifting his gaze to Carl once more, he was visibly changed. His unruffled self-assurance seemed to have been absorbed by the message he held in his hands. The pulse in his neck throbbed
conspicuously, his face was flushed, his lips trembled. There was little doubt that the letter had rekindled a very traumatic experience indeed.

  “Oh, God,” he said softly, closing his eyes and putting his hand to his mouth.

  His girlfriend took his hand in hers. “It’s all right, Tryggve. It had to come out sooner or later. Now it’s over, and everything’s going to be all right!”

  He dried his eyes and turned to face Carl. “I never saw the letter, only watched it being written.”

  He picked it up and read it again, his trembling fingers continuously reaching to wipe the tears from the corners of his eyes.

  “My brother was the cleverest, kindest person,” he stuttered, his lips quivering still. “But it was so hard for him to express himself.”

  He placed the letter on the table in front of him, folded his arms, and leaned forward. “It really was.”

  Carl reached to put a hand on his shoulder, but Tryggve shied away and shook his head.

  “Can we talk about it tomorrow?” he said. “I can’t now. You can sleep here on the sofa, if you want. Lillemor will make a bed up for you. Would that be OK?”

  Carl glanced at the sofa. It was on the short side, but thickly upholstered.

  He awoke to the swish of passing cars on the wet road outside. He uncurled and stretched his body, turning in the same movement to face the windows. It was impossible to tell what time it was, though it was still quite dark. Across the room, the young couple sat holding hands in a pair of dilapidated armchairs from IKEA. They nodded. There was already a thermos on the table, and next to it the letter.

  “You already know it was my elder brother Poul who wrote it,” Tryggve began, once Carl had shown signs of life with the first aromatic wafts of coffee.

  “His hands were tied behind his back.” Tryggve’s eyes flickered as he spoke.

  Hands tied. Laursen had been right.

  “I haven’t a clue how he managed it,” Tryggve went on. “But Poul was very thorough. He was good at drawing. He was good at a lot of things.”

  He smiled mournfully. “You’ve no idea how much it means to me that you’ve come here. To be sitting here with this letter in my hand. Poul’s letter.”

  Carl cast his eye once more over the document. Tryggve Holt had added a couple more letters. If anyone could, then surely it was he.

  Then Carl took a slurp of his coffee. Only his polite upbringing prevented him from immediately clutching his throat and spraying the hot liquid into the air with an explosion of guttural sound.

  It was like drinking tar. Pitch-black caffeinated poison.

  “Where is Poul now?” he asked, clenching lips and buttocks as hard as he could. “And why did he write that letter? We’d like to know so we can proceed with other investigations.”

  “You want to know where Poul is?” The young man fixed his mournful gaze on Carl. “If you’d asked me some years ago, I would have said he was in heaven with the one hundred and forty-four thousand. Now all I can say is that Poul is dead. This letter is the last thing he ever wrote. The last sign of life.”

  He swallowed with difficulty and paused for a moment.

  “Poul was killed less than two minutes after he dropped the bottle into the water,” he added, so quietly as to be barely audible.

  Carl gathered himself on the sofa. This was information he would have felt better prepared to receive fully clothed.

  “Are you saying he was murdered?”

  Tryggve nodded.

  Carl frowned. “You mean the kidnapper murdered Poul and let you go?”

  Lillemor extended her slender fingers and caught the tears as they descended down Tryggve’s cheek. He nodded again.

  “Yes. The bastard let me go, and I’ve cursed him a thousand times ever since.”

  19

  If he were to pick out one of his abilities that never failed him, it was being able to detect a false look.

  When, in his childhood, the family gathered at the table and so disingenuously recited the Lord’s Prayer, he could always tell when his father had beaten his mother. There were no visible marks, for he was clever enough never to hit anyone in the face. There was the congregation to think about. And his mother remained at heel, always with that inscrutable, sanctimonious look on her face, keeping an eye out to make sure the children remembered their manners and ate the apportioned number of potatoes with the apportioned amount of meat. But behind the calmness in her eyes were fear and hatred and utter despair.

  He saw it clearly.

  Sometimes, albeit more seldom, he would see the same false innocence in the eyes of his father, who nearly always wore the same expression. The routine meting out of corporal punishment was not in itself sufficient to dilate the icy, piercing pupils of the pastor.

  So he knew all about falseness in a person’s eye. And this was what he saw now.

  At the very moment he walked into the room he detected a strangeness in the way his wife looked at him. She was smiling, certainly, yet this was a smile that trembled, and her gaze came to a halt in the empty space in front of his face.

  Had she not clasped the child to her bosom as she sat there on the floor, he might have thought she was tired or had a headache, but there she was with the child in her arms and a distant look in her eye.

  Something wasn’t right.

  “Hi,” he said, inhaling the conglomerate of scents in the room. There was an aromatic undertone in the familiar smell of home, something that wasn’t usually there. A faint odor of complication, and of boundaries that had been overstepped.

  “Any chance of a cup of tea?” he asked, and stroked his hand across her cheek. It was warm, as if she were running a temperature.

  “And how are you today, young man?” He took the child in his arms and looked into his eyes. They were clear and happy and tired. The smile came instantly. “He seems to be all right now,” he said.

  “Yes, he is. But he was full of cold yesterday, then suddenly this morning he was right as rain. You know how they are.” She gave a hint of a smile, and it too seemed strange.

  It was as if she had aged during the few days he had been away.

  He kept his promise. Made love to her as intensely as the week before. But this time it took longer than usual. Longer for her to succumb and separate body from mind.

  Afterward, he drew her into his arms and allowed her to rest against his frame. It was her habit to play absently with the hairs on his chest, stroke his neck with her slender, sensual fingers. But this time she did none of this. All she did was concentrate on keeping her breathing steady, and otherwise she was silent.

  That was why he asked her so directly. “There’s a man’s bike in the driveway. Do you know where it came from?”

  She pretended to be sleeping.

  It wouldn’t matter what she said.

  A couple of hours later, he lay with his arms behind his head, watching the dawn of another March day, the lazy light seeping across the ceiling, meticulously enlarging the room surface by surface.

  His mind was at rest now. There was a problem, but he would deal with it once and for all.

  When she woke up, he would strip away her lies, layer by layer.

  The interrogation proper did not begin until after she had put the child down in his playpen. It was just as she had expected.

  For four years they had lived together without ever challenging the trust that existed between them, but now the time had come.

  “The bike’s locked, so it can’t have been stolen,” he said, sending her a look that was too neutral by far. “Someone left it there on purpose, wouldn’t you say?”

  She thrust out her lower lip and gave a shrug. How was she supposed to know? But her husband wasn’t looking.

  She felt the treachery of perspiration under her arms. In a moment, her forehead would begin to glisten.

  “I’m sure we could find out who owns it, if we wanted,” he said, and peered at her, his head lowered.

  “Do you think so
?” She tried to seem surprised rather than taken unawares. Then she put her hand to her forehead as though something were bothering her. Yes, it was damp now.

  He stared at her intently. The kitchen was too small all of a sudden.

  “How would we do that?” she went on.

  “We could ask the neighbors. They might have seen someone leave it there.”

  She breathed in deeply. She knew with certainty he would stop short of that.

  “Yes, I suppose we could,” she replied. “But don’t you think whoever left it there will come back for it at some point? We could put it out by the road.”

  He leaned back slightly. More relaxed now. She, however, was not. She drew her hand across her forehead again.

  “You’re sweating,” he said. “Is something the matter?”

  She pursed her lips and expelled air. Keep calm, she told herself. “I think I might be running a temperature. I must have caught something from Benjamin.”

  He nodded, then tilted his head. “By the way, where did you find the charger for your phone?”

  She took another bread roll and split it in two. “In the basket in the hall, with all the hats and gloves in it.” Now she felt herself to be on more solid ground. If only she could stay there.

  “In the basket?”

  “I didn’t know where to put it after I finished, so I just put it back again.”

  He stood up without a word. In a moment, he would sit down again and ask what on earth a phone charger had been doing in the basket in the hall. And she would say that most likely it had been there for ages.

  And then she realized her mistake.

  The bike in the driveway outside ruined the story. He would link the two things together. That was the way he was.

  She stared into the living room where Benjamin stood rattling the bars of his playpen as though he were an animal fighting to get out.