A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “I see,” came the reply. “Can you describe your brother-in-law to us, Mr. Gormsen?”

  “Yes, I can. He’s a big man. Balding, in his late fifties, always wears an olive-green sleeveless jacket and—”

  “Mr. Gormsen,” the policeman interrupted. “We’ve been called because Jens Krogh was found apparently lifeless on board a train. The police doctor is with us as we speak, and I very much regret to inform you that your brother-in-law has been declared dead.”

  He allowed the word “dead” to resonate for a moment before responding. “Oh, no. That’s dreadful. How did it happen?”

  “We don’t know yet. According to a fellow passenger, he collapsed.”

  He wondered whether he might be walking headlong into a trap.

  “Where will you be taking him?” he asked.

  He heard the police sergeant and the doctor confer in the background. “An ambulance will be coming to collect the body. There’ll probably be an autopsy.”

  “So he’ll be taken to the hospital in Roskilde?”

  “We’ll be getting off the train at Roskilde, yes.”

  He said his thanks and a few words of regret, then got out of the car to wipe the mobile, planning to hurl it into the windbreak of trees. They wouldn’t be able to trace him on that account if it was all a setup.

  “Hey,” came a voice from behind him. He turned to see a couple of men climbing out of a car that had just pulled in to the rest area. Lithuanian plates and faded jogging suits. Gaunt, unfriendly faces.

  They came straight toward him, their intentions clear. In a moment he would be sprawling on the ground with his pockets emptied. It was plainly their line of work.

  He raised a hand in warning, indicating the mobile. “Here,” he shouted, then hurled the phone hard against the forehead of the man in front, swiveling to one side and planting a back kick into the groin of his accomplice, causing his bony frame to crumple amid cries of pain, the switchblade he carried dropping to the ground.

  He had the knife in his hand within a second, thrusting it into the abdomen of the first man, then into the side of the second.

  And then he retrieved his phone and threw it and the knife as far into the bushes as he could.

  Life had taught him always to strike first.

  He left the two bleeding thugs to themselves and entered Roskilde Station into the GPS.

  He would be there in eight minutes.

  The ambulance had been waiting for some time before they came with the stretcher. He stepped into the array of inquisitive onlookers with their eyes fixed on Joshua’s body underneath the blanket. As soon as he saw the uniformed officer with Joshua’s coat and bag in his hands, everything was confirmed.

  Joshua was dead. The money was lost.

  “Fuck,” he exclaimed under his breath, repeating it to himself as he pointed the Mercedes toward Ferslev and the cottage that had been his bolt-hole for years. His cover—his address, his name, his van, everything that made it safe to be him, was all tied up in the place. And now it was over. Isabel had the license plate number of the van and had passed it on to her brother, and the owner of the vehicle could be traced to the address. It was no longer safe.

  By the time he reached the village and drove up the track between the trees to the cottage, peace had descended upon the landscape. The little community had long since succumbed to the torpor of the television screen. Only the main house of a farm across the fields displayed a pair of brightly lit windows. The alarm would probably be raised there.

  He noted how Rachel and Isabel had broken into his garage and the house. He went through the premises, removing items that might withstand the flames. A small mirror, a tin of sewing equipment, the first-aid box.

  Then he backed the van out of the barn, drove it around the side of the house, and reversed at full speed into the picture window that had afforded him such a good view over the fields.

  The sound of shattering glass prompted a brief cacophony of crows, but that was all.

  He walked around to the other side and went into the house, shining his torch in front of him. Perfect, he thought, seeing the van’s rear tires punctured and its back end protruding onto the laminated floor. He stepped carefully between the shards of glass and opened the back doors, took out a jerrican, and emptied its contents in an even trail from the living room to the kitchen, out into the hall, and up the stairs.

  Then he unscrewed the cap of the van’s petrol tank, tore off a strip of moldering curtain, and inserted the end deep into the tank.

  He stood for a moment in the yard and looked around before igniting the rag of curtain and throwing it into the petrol on the floor next to the line of gas cylinders in the hall.

  He was already on the road, racing through the gears of the Mercedes, by the time the van’s petrol tank exploded with a deafening boom. A minute later, the gas canisters went up. The explosion was so violent it almost raised the roof.

  Not until he had passed the village grocery store and could see across the fields again did he pull in and look back.

  The cottage was ablaze behind the trees, like a bonfire on Midsummer’s Eve, spitting out sparks into the sky. Already it could be seen from miles away. And before long, the flames would lick the branches of the trees and everything would be razed to the ground.

  There was no more to fear on that account.

  The fire brigade would quickly see that nothing could be saved.

  They would put it down to a boyish prank that had got out of hand.

  It happened so often, out in the country.

  He stood in front of the door of the room in which his wife lay trapped underneath the packing cases, noting once again with a strange blend of sadness and satisfaction that the place was as quiet as the grave. They had been good together, the two of them. She was kind and beautiful and a good mother to their child. It could all have been so very different. Once again, he had only himself to blame for things not having worked out. Before he lived with someone again, he would have to get rid of everything he had hidden away inside that room. The past had taken charge of his life until now, but he would not allow it to assume control of his future, too. He would do a couple more kidnappings, sell the house, and settle down somewhere far away. Perhaps he might even learn how to live a normal life.

  He lay stretched out on the corner sofa for some time, thinking through the things he had to do. He could keep Vibegården and its boathouse, that much was clear. But he would need to find a replacement for the cottage at Ferslev. A little house far from the beaten track. A place where no one came, and best if the owner was some local outcast. An old soak who kept himself to himself and owed no one any favors. He might have to look farther south this time. He remembered a couple of places he’d considered at one time when driving around the Næstved area, but experience told him that making the final selection would be no easy matter.

  The owner of the cottage at Ferslev had fitted the bill perfectly. No one had any interest in him, and he even less in others. He had spent most of his working life in Greenland and had apparently had some kind of old flame in Sweden, so they said in the village. Apparently. It was the very cloudiness of the word that gave him his lead. A man who kept his own company, living on money earned at a time when his life had been more successful, so the story went. The villagers called him “the odd bird,” and thereby signed his death warrant.

  More than ten years had now passed since he had taken the odd bird’s life, after which he had meticulously made sure to pay the bills that on occasion dropped into the letter box of the cottage. After a couple of years he canceled the electricity and the refuse collection, and after that nobody ever came. He had a passport and driver’s license made in the man’s name, with new photos and a more plausible date of birth, by a photographer in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district. A decent, reliable man for whom forgery had become a skill comparable to that exhibited by Rembrandt’s pupils at the behest of their master. A true artist.

 
The name Mads Christian Fog had accompanied him for a decade, but now it was over.

  Now he was just Chaplin again.

  At the age of sixteen and a half he had fallen in love with one of his stepsisters. She was vulnerable, ethereal, with a delicate, high brow and thin blue veins showing at her temples. In stark contrast to the crudity of his stepfather’s genetic material and his own mother’s stockiness.

  He wanted to kiss her and hold her in his arms, vanish into her gaze, and descend into her inner being, and he knew it was forbidden. In the eyes of God, they were siblings, and in their house His eyes were everywhere.

  Eventually, he found no other outlet but to enjoy what sinful pleasures he could derive alone under his duvet or from stolen glimpses in the evenings through the gaps in the ceiling boards of her bedroom.

  And then he got caught in the act. He had been lying flat on his stomach, spying on her beauty below, which had been covered only by a flimsy nightdress, when all of a sudden she looked up and caught his eye. He was so flustered that he leaped to his feet and gashed his head on a nail jutting out from one of the roof beams, a deep wound just behind his right ear.

  They heard his cries from the attic, and his pleasures were over.

  Pious as ever, his sister Eva snitched to their mother and stepfather. What her blind eyes could not see was the hateful rage that consumed both parents at this act of debauchery.

  They interrogated him under the threat of eternal damnation, but he refused to admit to anything. That he had spied upon his stepsister. That he had wanted to see the object of his desire naked. How could their curses make him admit to that? He had heard it all before and all too often.

  “You’ve brought this upon yourself,” his stepfather bellowed, grabbing hold of him from behind. He may not have been the stronger, but the full nelson he applied so unexpectedly was remarkably effective, his arms encircling the boy’s torso, hands clasped and pressing down on his neck.

  “Bring the crucifix!” he shouted to his wife. “Beat Satan from this infested body! Beat this boy until all his devils are banished!”

  He saw the crucifix raised above his mother’s frenzied eyes and felt her moldy breath against his face as the first blow was delivered.

  “In the name of all glory!” she screamed, lifting the crucifix again. Beads of perspiration gathered on her top lip, and his stepfather tightened his hold, repeatedly grunting out his own exhortation: “In the name of the Almighty!”

  After twenty blows against his shoulders and upper arms, his mother stepped back, exhausted and gasping for breath.

  From that moment, there was no turning back.

  His two stepsisters wept in the adjoining room. They had overheard everything and seemed genuinely shocked. Eva, on the other hand, appeared unmoved, though she, too, had most certainly been aware of all that had taken place. She went on reading her Braille, but was unable to conceal the embittered look on her face.

  That same evening, he crushed sleeping pills and put them in his mother’s and stepfather’s coffee. And when night came, and they were sleeping heavily, he dissolved the rest of the bottle’s contents in water. It took a while to turn them over onto their backs, and even longer for him to pour the thick mixture down their throats. But time was no longer an issue.

  He wiped the empty pill bottle and pressed it into his stepfather’s hand. Then he curled the fingers of both unconscious parents around a pair of drinking glasses, placing one on each bedside table, pouring some water into them before closing the bedroom door behind him.

  “What are you doing in there?” said a voice.

  He peered into the darkness. Eva’s domain, and her advantage. The dark was her friend now, and her ears were keen as a dog’s.

  “Nothing, Eva. I just wanted to say sorry, but they’re asleep. I think they took sleeping pills.”

  “Then I hope they sleep well,” was all she said.

  The bodies were collected the next day. The double suicide was a scandal in the little community, and Eva said nothing. Perhaps she already sensed, even then, that what had happened, and the fact that her brother was also to blame for her own blindness, which he grieved over in his own silent way, was to become her insurance against a life marked by poverty and powerlessness.

  Their stepsisters had chosen eternity only a couple of years later. They walked hand in hand into the lake together, and the lake accepted them. Thus they were freed from the pain of recollection. He and Eva were not.

  The deaths of their parents were now more than twenty-five years in the past, and still there were new fanatics who continued to misinterpret the word “benevolence.”

  To hell with them. He hated them more than anything else. To hell with all those who in the name of God believed themselves to be above all others.

  They were to be removed from the earth.

  He twisted the key of the van and the key to the cottage from his key ring and dumped them in his neighbor’s dustbin underneath the top rubbish bag, glancing around to make sure he was unseen.

  Then he went back into his own drive and emptied his letter box.

  The mailshots went straight into the bin, and the rest he threw onto the table in the front room. A couple of bills, two newspapers, and a small, handwritten note with the logo of the bowling club on it.

  It was too soon for there to be anything in the papers yet, but the regional radio station had something about a couple of Lithuanians who had apparently been at each other’s throats and got themselves badly injured in the process, and then came the story about the car crash involving the two women. Details were sparse, but what they gave was enough: the scene of the accident, the women’s ages, the fact that they had both suffered severe injuries after having raced across the country and smashed through the toll station barriers on the Storebælt Bridge. No names were revealed, but the possibility of a third party being involved was mentioned.

  He searched for the accident on the Internet. The online version of one of the tabloids carried the additional information that the lives of both women remained in the balance after they had undergone surgery during the night, and that police were puzzled by their hazardous passage over the bridge. A doctor from the Trauma Center of the Rigshospital in Copenhagen was mentioned by name and seemed pessimistic as to their prospects.

  Even so, he was worried.

  He found a video presentation of the Trauma Center on the hospital’s website, studied what they did and where, and then checked the map showing the locations of the hospital’s various departments. He would know where to find them.

  For the time being, however, he would simply monitor the two women’s condition.

  Next, he picked up the note with the bowling logo on it and read the handwritten message:

  Stopped by today, but nobody in. Team tournament on Wed moved from 7:30 to 7 p.m. Remember winning ball afterward. Or maybe you’ve got balls enough as it is, ha ha? Maybe you’ll both come? Ha ha, again! Cheers, The Pope.

  He looked up at the ceiling, toward the room where his wife lay. If he waited a couple of days before taking the body up to the boathouse, he would be able to get rid of all three of them at once. A couple more days without water and the kids would be dead anyway. Who cared? They could thank their parents.

  Pure idiocy. All that trouble for nothing.

  33

  He had heard some disturbance downstairs during the night, but hadn’t realized that the doctor had been there again.

  “Hardy’s got some fluid on his lungs,” said Morten. “He’s having difficulty breathing.” He looked concerned. His cheerful, chubby face seemed almost to have collapsed in on itself.

  “Is it serious?” Carl asked. It’d be a tragedy, if it was.

  “The doctor wants Hardy admitted to the Rigshospital for observation, so they can check his heart and stuff. He was worried about pneumonia, too. That could be fatal for a man in Hardy’s condition.”

  Carl nodded. Clearly, they should be taking no chances.
/>
  He smoothed his hand over his friend’s hair.

  “Christ, Hardy, what are you playing at? You should have woken me up.”

  “I told Morten not to,” Hardy whispered with a despondent look on his face. More despondent than usual. “You’ll have me back, I hope? Once I’m discharged again?”

  “Course we will, mate. The place wouldn’t be the same without you.”

  Hardy smiled weakly. “I don’t think Jesper would agree with you there. He’d love it if everything was back to normal when he got home this afternoon.”

  This afternoon? Carl had forgotten.

  “Anyway, I won’t be here when you get home from work, Carl. Morten’s going with me to the hospital, so I’ll be in good hands. Who knows, maybe I’ll be back in a few days…” He tried to smile as he gasped for breath. “Carl, something’s been bothering me,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Do you remember that case of Børge Bak’s, a prostitute found dead underneath the Langebro Bridge? It looked like a drowning accident, maybe even a suicide. Only then it turned out not to be.”

  Carl nodded. He remembered it well. A black girl, not much more than eighteen years old. Naked, apart from a bracelet of twisted copper wire around her ankle. Nothing out of the ordinary, a lot of African women wore that kind of thing. More interesting were the needle marks on her arms. Typical for a junkie prostitute, but not for the African girls who worked the streets of Vesterbro.

  “She’d been killed by her pimp, wasn’t that it?” Carl said.

  “More likely by those who sold her to her pimp.”

  Hardy was right, he remembered now.

  “That case reminds me of the one you’ve got now. Those bodies in the fires.”

  “You mean the bracelet around her ankle?”

  “Exactly,” Hardy said. “The girl wanted out. Wanted to go home. But she hadn’t earned enough, so they wouldn’t let her.”