A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

“We have spoken to Tryggve,” Carl said, pushing the Swedish police artist’s drawing across the desk. “As you can see, we already have a likeness of the perpetrator. For the purpose of our inquiries, I want you to give us your version of what happened. It might give us something more to go on. We realize that you feel threatened by this man.” He planted his finger so demonstratively on the drawing that Martin Holt jumped.

  “You have my assurance that no unauthorized person knows that we’re on to him, so try to relax.”

  The man removed his gaze reluctantly from the drawing in front of him and looked Carl straight in the eye. His voice trembled as he spoke. “How easy do you think it will be for me to explain to the Jehovah’s Witness circuit overseers why I was taken in by the police? And you’re telling me no one else knows there’s something afoot? You’ve hardly been discreet about it.”

  “All this could have been avoided if only you had let me into your home in Sweden. That trip was part of an effort to catch Poul’s murderer.”

  Martin Holt’s shoulders dropped. His eyes returned to the drawing on the desk. “It’s a good likeness,” he said. “But his eyes weren’t so close together, and not quite as dark. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Carl stood up. “I’m going to show you something you’ve never seen until now.” He gestured for Martin Holt to follow him.

  From Assad’s office came the sound of laughter. The distinctive, booming laughter of West Jutland that most likely had evolved to drown out the engines of fishing boats in stormy weather. Assad certainly had the knack of entertaining. And with the young officers from Holbæk in his assistant’s capable hands, Carl was in no hurry.

  “Have a look at how many unsolved cases we’ve got here,” he said, directing Martin Holt’s gaze toward Assad’s filing system on the wall. “Each of these cases involves some dreadful event, and in each case the grief that event has caused will hardly differ from your own.”

  He looked at the man next to him, whose eyes remained cold as ice. These cases were nothing to do with him, and the people involved in them were not his brethren. What happened outside the world of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was seemingly of little concern to him.

  “We could have picked out any one of these cases on which to focus our efforts. Do you understand? But we chose the one concerning your son. And now I’m going to show you why.”

  The man followed him the last few meters along the corridor. Like a dead man walking.

  Then Carl pointed at Rose and Assad’s blowup of the message in the bottle. “That’s why,” he said, and stepped back.

  Martin Holt stood for a long time reading the message. So slowly did his eyes pass over the lines that Carl could follow how far he had read. And when he had finished, he started from the beginning again. He was a pillar, slowly crumbling. A human being for whom principles were more important than anything else. But also a man endeavoring to protect his remaining children by suppression and lies.

  Now he stood here absorbing the words of his dead son. As halting as they were, they went straight into his heart. And suddenly he staggered backward, reaching his hands out behind him to support himself against the wall. Had it not been there, he would have fallen. Here were his son’s pleas for help, as loud as the trumpets of Jericho. Help he had been unable to provide.

  Carl allowed him to stand for a moment alone with his tears. Then Martin Holt stepped forward and placed a cautious hand against his son’s letter. His hands trembled upon this contact, and gradually, slowly, his fingers traced backward from word to word, as high up the wall as he could reach.

  Finally, his head dropped to one side. Thirteen years of pain released.

  When they returned to Carl’s office, he asked for a glass of water.

  And then he told Carl everything he knew.

  36

  “The troops are gathered again,” Yrsa hollered from the corridor, seconds before her head appeared around Carl’s door. Judging from the state of her hair, she must have passed through the basement like a whirlwind.

  “Tell me you love me,” she twittered, dropping a stack of aerial photos onto the desk in front of Carl.

  “Did you find the house, Yrsa?” Assad shouted back, dashing in from his cubbyhole.

  “No such luck. But I did find some possibilities, though none with any boathouse visible. The photos are in the order that I’d check them out if I were you. I’ve put rings around the houses I think are interesting.”

  Carl picked up the stack and counted. Fifteen sheets and no boathouse. What the hell was she playing at?

  He glanced at the dates. Most of the photos were from June 2005.

  “Hey!” he exclaimed. “These were taken nine years after Poul Holt was murdered, Yrsa. That boathouse could have been pulled down and rebuilt a dozen times since then.”

  “A dozen times?” Assad intervened. “No, I do not think that can be correct, Carl.”

  “It’s a figure of speech, Assad.” Carl took a deep breath. “Haven’t we got anything older than this?”

  Yrsa winked at him. Was he putting her on?

  “Do you know what, Mr. Detective?” she said. “If that boathouse was pulled down, it’s hardly going to matter much now, is it?”

  Carl shook his head. “Wrong, Yrsa. The killer may still own the house, in which case we might find him there, no? Get back upstairs to Lis and find some older photos.”

  “The same fifteen areas?” She indicated the stack on his desk.

  “No, Yrsa. For the entire shoreline of the fjords prior to 1996. That can’t be so hard to understand, surely?”

  She stood and tugged for a moment at her curls, somewhat deflated, then turned and slunk off as best she could in her less-than-sensible shoes.

  “I think it will be no easy task to make her glad again,” Assad commented, fanning his hand in the air as if he had just burned his fingers. “Did you observe how annoyed she was with herself, because she did not think about the detail of the date?”

  Carl heard a buzzing sound and saw the fly land on the ceiling. Back with bragging rights.

  “Never mind, Assad. She’ll get over it.”

  Assad shook his head. “Yes, Carl. But remember, no matter how hard you sit down on the fencepost, your arse will hurt when you stand up.”

  Carl frowned, wondering if he had understood him right.

  “Do all your sayings involve arseholes, Assad?” he replied, dodging the issue.

  Assad chuckled. “I know one or two without,” he said. “But they are poor.”

  OK. If this was par for the course with Syrian humor, his laughter muscles could take things easy if he were ever so unfortunate as to get an invite to visit the place.

  “What did Martin Holt tell you when you questioned him, Carl?”

  Carl picked up his notepad. Not that he had written much down, but what he had noted certainly seemed useful.

  “Contrary to what I expected, Martin Holt is not an entirely unlikable man,” Carl said. “Your blowup out in the corridor put his feet back on the ground.”

  “So he told you about Poul?”

  “He did. He spoke nonstop for half an hour. In a very shaky voice.” Carl plucked a smoke from his breast pocket and turned it between his fingers. “Getting things off his chest, you could say. He hasn’t spoken to anyone about his son for years. The pain of it was too much for him.”

  “What does it say on your notepad, Carl?”

  Carl lit his cigarette, sparing a thought for Jacobsen’s unsatisfied nicotine cravings. Sometimes a person could rise so far that he was no longer his own boss. It was a place Carl had no intention of going.

  “Martin Holt said our drawing was a good likeness, but the kidnapper’s eyes were too dark and too close together. The mustache was too big and the hair probably a bit longer over the ears.”

  “Should we have a new one done, Carl?” Assad asked, wafting away the smoke in front of him.

  Carl shook his head. Tryggve’s take could be just as good
as his father’s. The human eye interpreted differently depending on the beholder.

  “The most important thing, though, was that Martin Holt could tell me exactly how and where the kidnapper took receipt of his ransom. A bag containing the money was simply thrown off a train. The man had a strobe light, and—”

  “What is a strobe light?”

  “A strobe light?” Carl took a good drag. “It’s a kind of light they use in discos. They flash like a camera.”

  “Oh!” Assad beamed. “It makes people look like they are jumping, like in the old films. I know this very well.”

  Carl pondered his cigarette. Did it taste of syrup, or what?

  “Holt was able to give us a fairly exact location for where the delivery took place,” he said. “A stretch of road running alongside the railway between Sorø and Slagelse.” Carl got out his map and pointed. “Here, between Vedbysønder and Lindebjerg.”

  “It looks like a good place,” Assad commented. “Close to the railway and not so far from the motorway, allowing him to get away again quickly.”

  Carl traced the railway on the map. Assad was right. It was a perfect spot.

  “How did the kidnapper get Poul’s father to that place?” Assad asked.

  Carl studied his cigarette packet. How the fuck did that syrup taste get there?

  “He was instructed to get on a certain train from Copenhagen to Korsør, and then to keep an eye out for the strobe. He was to sit in a first-class compartment on the left-hand side of the train, and as soon as he saw the light he was to throw the bag with the money out of the window.”

  “When did he then find out that Poul was murdered?”

  “When? He received further instructions over the phone as to where he could pick up the children. But when he and his wife arrived, they found only Tryggve lying in a field. He’d been given something to knock him out, probably chloroform. Tryggve was the one who told his parents that Poul had been murdered, and that they would lose more children if anything should get out about the kidnapping. Apart from the terrible news of Poul’s death, Tryggve’s shock over what had happened made an indelible impression on Martin Holt and his wife.”

  Assad drew his shoulders up to his ears as a shiver seemingly ran down his spine. “If it had been my children, then…” He passed his index finger across his throat and let his head flop to one side.

  Carl didn’t doubt his assistant meant what he said. He consulted his notepad again. “At the end of our interview, Martin Holt told me one final thing that may prove useful to us.”

  “What was that, Carl?”

  “The key ring on which the kidnapper kept his car keys also had a miniature bowling ball with the number one on it.”

  The phone on Carl’s desk rang. Probably Mona wanting to thank him for being so accommodating.

  “Mørck?” boomed a voice at the other end, which turned out to belong to Klaes Thomasen. “Just to inform you that we took advantage of the good weather early this morning, and the wife and I have now sailed through the rest of the area we picked out. As far as we can see, there’s nothing visible from the water, but there are several places in which the vegetation is very thick and runs right down to the shore, so we’ve marked them down for you.”

  Once again, a bit of plain old-fashioned good luck wouldn’t have gone amiss.

  “What area did you reckon might be the most promising?” Carl asked, stubbing out his syrupy smoke in the ashtray.

  “Well…” Carl could almost see Thomasen with his pipe in his mouth. Probably still in his sailing togs on the jetty. “I’d say we should be focusing on Østskov near Sønderby, as well as Bognæs and Nordskoven. There were quite a few secluded spots, but like I said we couldn’t see anything for sure. I’ll have a word with the forest officer from Nordskoven later on today. Maybe he can help us out.”

  Carl made a note of the three locations and said thanks. He promised to say hello to some of Thomasen’s old mates on the force. It had been years since any of them had worked at HQ, but Carl spared him that information for the sake of politeness, then hung up.

  “Nothing,” Carl said, as he turned toward Assad. “Nothing concrete to go on from Thomasen, though he did mention a couple of areas we might want to take a closer look at.” He found them on the map. “Let’s see if Yrsa can come up with something a bit better than before, then we can compare the data. In the meantime, just carry on with what you’re doing.”

  He managed to get in half an hour’s wholesome shut-eye with his feet up on the desk before a tickling sensation on the bridge of his nose dragged him back to consciousness. He shook his head vigorously, opened his eyes, and found himself to be the focus of a horde of shiny, blue-green flies in avid search of somewhere else to lay their eggs besides the gooey substance he found stuck to his cigarette packet.

  “Bastards!” he spluttered, flailing his arms in the air and sending at least a couple of the pesky things hurtling backward onto the floor with all legs splayed.

  This was the last straw.

  He peered into his wastebasket. It had been weeks since he had thrown anything out, and there was his rubbish still, though organic matter of the kind that might tempt procreating flies was wholly absent.

  Carl glanced out into the corridor. There was another one of the bastards. He found himself wondering whether one of Assad’s exotic lunchtime treats had come back from the dead. Maybe his tahini had come alive, or perhaps his sickening Turkish delight was about to hatch out some imported pests?

  “Do you know anything about these flies?” he demanded, even before walking into Assad’s matchbox office.

  There was a penetrating smell inside the room. Not the usual sugary scent. More like someone had been playing with a Zippo lighter.

  Assad held him off for a moment with a hand in the air, absorbed in a phone call. “Yes,” he repeated a few times into the receiver. “But we shall need to come and see for ourselves,” he said eventually, his voice slightly deeper, his countenance slightly more authoritative than normal. He made an appointment and put down the phone.

  “I asked if you knew anything about these flies,” Carl said again, pointing to a couple that had settled on a kitschy poster depicting some camels traipsing through a large amount of sand.

  “Carl, I think we have found a family now,” Assad said, though with a rather skeptical look on his face. Like a man who had just studied his lottery ticket and discovered all the numbers fit the jackpot.

  “A what?”

  “A family who has been in the hands of our kidnapper. I think so.”

  “Would that be the people from the House of Christ, the ones you told us about before?”

  Assad nodded. “Lis found them. New address and new names, but the same people. She checked with the Civil Registration System. Four children. The youngest, Flemming, was fourteen years old five years ago.”

  “Did you ask where the boy is today?”

  “No, I did not think that to be so clever at this point.”

  “What was the bit about our having to come and see for ourselves?”

  “Oh, I told the wife that we were from the tax authorities, and we found it odd that their youngest son, the only one of their children who seems not to have emigrated, did not send in his tax returns, despite him being over eighteen now.”

  “Assad, that’s not right. We can’t go around passing ourselves off as civil servants from other authorities. Anyway, how did you find out about him not submitting tax returns?”

  “I didn’t find out. I just made that up.” He dabbed at his nose with a handkerchief.

  Carl shook his head. All the same, Assad was definitely on to something. If people hadn’t actually committed a crime, there was nothing like the taxman to put the wind up them.

  “When’s our appointment, and where?”

  “A small place called Tølløse. The wife said her husband would be home at half past four.”

  Carl glanced at his watch. “OK, we’ll go together. Ni
ce work, Assad, very nice indeed.”

  Carl flashed him a smile that lasted a millisecond, then pointed at the fly convention gathering on Assad’s poster. “Come on, Assad. Are you keeping something in here that might have caused these little bastards to start calling this place home?”

  Assad threw up his arms. “I do not know where they are coming from.” His face froze for a moment. “But I do know where that one is coming from,” he added, pointing to a singular insect of smaller proportions than the flies. A frail, foolhardy creature that ended its days suddenly and at that very instant between the palms of Assad’s brawny brown hands.

  “Gotcha!” Assad exclaimed in triumph, wiping the remains of the little moth onto his notepad. “I have discovered many of these ones just there.” He indicated his prayer mat, only to see with horror its death sentence pop up in Carl’s eyes.

  “But Carl, now there are not so many of these insects left in the prayer mat. This is a mat that belonged to my father, and I am so very attached to it. I beat it only this morning before you arrived. Behind the door by the asbestos.”

  Carl lifted a corner of the mat. Assad’s rescue attempt was obviously a last-ditch effort. There was hardly anything left but the fringes.

  For a brief moment, Carl pictured the police archives in asbestosland and wondered whether the reputations of one or two offenders might now be saved should these ravenous moths take a liking to yellowed parchment.

  “Have you sprayed it with something?” he asked. “It stinks to high heaven in here.”

  Assad smiled. “Petroleum does the trick.”

  Apparently, the smell didn’t bother him. Perhaps it was one of the incidental advantages of having grown up in a place where crude oil was bubbling out of the ground. If they actually had any oil in Syria.

  Carl shook his head and fled the fumes. Tølløse in two hours. Still time to get to the bottom of that fly business.

  He stood quite still for a moment in the corridor. A gentle hum seemed to emanate from somewhere above the pipes on the ceiling. He looked up and again caught a glimpse of his alpha fly, spotted with correction fluid. The bloody thing was everywhere.