A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Disconcerting information.

  He turned quickly to look. True enough, a man was sitting on his own with his arms folded. A man in a police uniform. Isabel’s brother. There could be little doubt: the same high cheekbones, the same-shaped face, the same nose. This wasn’t good at all.

  He looked at the secretary with a hopeful expression. “Has Isabel been making progress?”

  “As far as I know, yes. We don’t normally move people on to other departments unless they’re improving.”

  As far as she knew. She knew perfectly well, of course she did. What she didn’t know was when the move would happen, but apparently it was imminent.

  Most inconvenient. And her brother here to boot.

  “May I go in to Rachel? Is she awake? Lisa, I mean.”

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid Ms. Krogh is still very much unconscious.”

  He bent forward slightly. “But Isabel would be conscious?” he asked quietly.

  “I’m not actually sure, to be honest. Try asking the nurse over there.” She pointed toward a blond, rather weary-looking woman on her way along the corridor with some medical records under her arm. The secretary turned to a new visitor who had now appeared at the counter. His audience was over.

  “Excuse me.” He stopped the nurse in her tracks, his arm aloft. Mette Frigaard-Rasmussen, her badge read. “I don’t suppose you could tell me if Isabel Jønsson is conscious? Would it be possible to see her?”

  Maybe she wasn’t her patient. Maybe it wasn’t her shift. Maybe it wasn’t her day. Or maybe she was just too exhausted to do anything else but peer at him through the narrow slits of her eyes and reply through equally narrow lips.

  “Isabel Jønsson? Erm…” She stared into space for a moment. “Yes, she’s conscious, but heavily sedated. Her jaw’s fractured, so she can’t actually speak. She’s not communicating at all at the moment, but it’ll come.”

  She mustered all her strength to raise a smile. He thanked her and let her get on with the rest of what was obviously a demanding day.

  Isabel wasn’t communicating. Good news at last. Now he had to take advantage.

  He pressed his lips together resolutely, slipped away from the waiting area, and proceeded farther along the corridor. Soon he would need to get away fast. His preference was for the lifts outside, as if nothing untoward had happened. But if other alternatives existed, he needed to know what they were.

  He passed several rooms in which lives hung in the balance and doctors and nurses worked calmly and diligently. In the observation center, a group of people in white coats sat staring at computer screens, talking softly among themselves. Everything under control.

  An auxiliary walked past him and seemed to wonder for a moment what he might be doing there. But they exchanged smiles, and the man continued along the corridor.

  There were colors on the walls. Bright, intense paintings. Stained glass. Emanating life. Death was unwelcome here.

  He rounded a red-painted corner and discovered a second corridor running parallel to the one from which he had come, row upon row of what seemed to be small rooms for staff on its left side. Nameplates outside the doors indicated who occupied them. He looked to the right, expecting to end up at reception again if he continued in that direction. But the route seemed to have been blocked off. However, there was a lift. Another possible escape hatch.

  He noticed a white coat hanging by the open door of a room full of linen and various boxes of equipment stacked on shelves. Probably both it and the linen had been left for the laundry.

  He slipped inside, grabbed the coat, and put it over his arm, waiting a moment before heading back toward reception.

  On the way, he nodded to the same auxiliary as before, then patted his jacket pocket to make sure the syringes were there.

  Of course they were.

  He sat down on a blue sofa in the first and smaller of the two seating areas. The policeman in the other area appeared not to notice him. Five minutes later, the officer stood up and went to the reception desk. Two doctors and a couple of auxiliaries had just left the room in which his sister lay. New faces were beginning to appear among the staff, distributing themselves into their respective places.

  The shift change was in full swing.

  The policeman sent an inquiring look in the direction of the secretary. She nodded back. It would be all right now. Isabel Jønsson’s brother could go in.

  He followed the man with his eyes and saw him disappear into the room. Before long, a porter would come to move the man’s sister. Not the best circumstances for what he needed to do.

  If Isabel was well enough to be moved, he would have to kill her first. There might not be time for the second job.

  And time was of the essence. He would have to get the brother out of there as soon as possible, no matter the risk. The prospect of approaching the man didn’t appeal to him at all. Perhaps Isabel had told him everything. That’s what she had said. Perhaps the brother knew too much. He would at least have to cover his face in the man’s presence.

  He waited until the secretary began to gather her things together and vacate her chair for her replacement.

  He put on the coat.

  Now was the time.

  At first, he failed to recognize the two women. But in the corner sat the policeman, talking to his sister, holding her hand.

  So the woman nearest the door in that snarl of masks and tubes and IV equipment was Rachel.

  Behind her was a high-tech wall of machines and monitors emitting flashes of light and beeping sounds. Her face was almost entirely covered, her body likewise, the blanket not quite hiding the suggestion of severe injury and irreparable damage.

  He looked across at Isabel and her brother. “What happened, Isabel?” the brother had just asked.

  Then he squeezed between the wall and Rachel’s bed and leaned forward.

  “I’m sorry, but we shall have to send you out again, Mr. Jønsson,” he said, bending over Rachel and drawing open her eyelids as though to examine the dilation of her pupils. She was certainly unconscious.

  “Isabel’s going to be transferred now,” he went on. “Perhaps you might like to visit the cafeteria in the meantime. We’ll be sure to let you know where Isabel’s been moved to when you come back. Say, in about half an hour?”

  He heard the man get to his feet with a few short, parting words to his sister. A man used to obeying orders.

  He gave the policeman a nod, his face turned aside as the man left the room. Then he stood for a moment, considering the woman lying in front of him. It seemed unlikely she would ever pose him any threat.

  And at that very moment, Rachel opened her eyes and stared at him as though fully conscious. Stared at him with her empty gaze, and yet so intensely that he found it hard to wrest himself away. Then her eyes closed once more. He stood motionless to see whether it would happen again. It didn’t. Probably it was just some kind of reflex. He listened to the beeping of her monitors. Her heart rate had definitely increased during the minute that had passed since he entered the room.

  Then he turned to Isabel, whose chest now rose and sank at diminishing intervals. She knew he was there. She had recognized his voice, but what good would it do her? Her jaw was immobilized and her eyes bandaged. She lay hooked up to IV apparatus and monitoring equipment, though with no tubes in her mouth, no respirator. Soon she would be able to speak. Her life was no longer in danger.

  Ironic, to say the least, he thought to himself, that all these positive life signs were to be the death of her. He stepped toward her, his eyes already seeking out a suitable vein in her arm.

  He took the first syringe from his pocket. Tore the packaging from the needle and joined the two parts together. Then he drew out the plunger, filling the syringe with air.

  “You should have contented yourself with what you got from me, Isabel,” he said, noting that her breathing and heart rate now increased again.

  Not good, he thought, going around her
bed, pushing the support pillow away from her arm. Her reactions would be registered in the observation center.

  “Relax, Isabel,” he said. “I won’t harm you. I’ve come to say the children will be safe. I’ll look after them. When you’re better, I’ll send you a message saying where they are. Believe me, it was about money, that’s all. I’m no killer. That’s what I came to tell you.”

  He saw that her breathing remained heavy, but her heart rate slowed. Good.

  Then he looked up at Rachel’s monitors. The beeps were coming thick and fast now. All of a sudden, her heart seemed to have gone berserk.

  Hurry, he told himself.

  He took a tight grip on Isabel’s arm, found a pulsating vein, and jabbed in the needle. It slid in as easy as could be.

  Isabel didn’t flinch. Most likely she was so doped up he could have stuck it right through her arm without any noticeable reaction.

  He tried to depress the plunger of the syringe, but it wouldn’t budge. He must have missed the vein.

  He withdrew the needle and jabbed again. This time, Isabel gave a start. Now she knew what he was doing, that he meant her harm. Her heart rate shot up once more. He pressed down on the plunger, and again it refused to move. Fuck. He would have to find a new vein.

  And then the door opened.

  “What’s going on here?” a nurse cried, her eyes darting from Rachel’s monitors to this unfamiliar man in a white coat, with a needle pointed at Isabel’s arm.

  He dropped the syringe into his pocket and was in motion before the woman realized what was happening. The blow to her throat was delivered sharply and with great force, causing her to fall to the floor in front of the open door.

  “Attend to her. She’s collapsed. Overexertion, by the looks of it,” he barked at the nurse who came running from the observation center to check the danger signals from the two women’s monitors. Within seconds, the whole unit was an anthill. People in white swarmed forth, gathering at the door of the room as he stole away toward the lifts.

  It was a disaster. Twice now the seconds had ticked in Isabel’s favor. Ten seconds more and he would have hit a good vein and pumped it full of air. Ten seconds. Ten fucking seconds. All it took to fuck everything up.

  Behind him came the sound of hectic cries as the doors shut in his wake. Outside in the lift area, an emaciated man with dark blotches under his eyes sat waiting for some message from the Department of Plastic Surgery. The man nodded in acknowledgment at the sight of his smock. Such was the effect of a white coat in a hospital.

  He pushed the lift button, glancing around to locate the fire stairs as the doors opened. He nodded to other white coats and a couple of sad-faced visitors as he stepped inside, making straight for the rear wall so no one would notice his missing name tag.

  On the ground floor, he almost bumped into Isabel’s brother outside the lift. Apparently, this was as far as he had got.

  The two men with whom he was speaking looked suspiciously like colleagues. Maybe not the little Arab, but the Dane at least. They looked concerned.

  He knew how they felt. Fuck.

  Outside in the open air, he looked up and saw an air ambulance approaching the roof of the main building. Next delivery of problems to the Trauma Center.

  Keep them coming, he thought to himself. The more emergencies they had to deal with, the fewer resources would be left to attend to the two women whose presence there he had precipitated.

  He removed his coat only when he reached the shadow of the trees in the parking area where he’d left his car.

  He tossed the hairpiece onto the backseat.

  41

  He and Assad had scarcely descended into the basement before Carl registered the changes that had occurred. They were not for the better. Cardboard boxes and all sorts of junk lay scattered everywhere. Steel shelving units were stacked up against the wall, and the clattering that echoed through the depths indicated that whatever was going on certainly wasn’t finished.

  “Oh, Christ!” he exclaimed, staring down their corridor. Where the fuck was the door that was supposed to partition off the asbestos? Where was the wall they just had put up? Was it those gypsum boards leaned up against their case system and their blowup of the message in the bottle?

  “What’s going on?” he hollered, as Rose poked her head around the door of her office. Thank God. At least she was recognizable. Jet-black hair, white powdery stuff all over her face, and layers of eye shadow. Looking daggers, the way they knew her best. Good old Rose.

  “They’re emptying the basement. The wall was in the way,” she said uninterestedly.

  It was Assad who remembered to welcome her back.

  “So lovely to see you, Rose. You look…” He stood for a second, as if searching for the right word. Then he beamed. “You look so lovely as yourself.”

  Perhaps not the wording Carl would have chosen.

  “Thanks for the flowers,” she said, raising her painted eyebrows slightly in what was probably a display of emotion.

  Carl smiled briefly. “No problem. We’ve missed you. Not that we weren’t happy with Yrsa, mind,” he added quickly. “But still.”

  He pointed along the corridor. “This wall business means we’ll have Health and Safety on our backs again,” he said. “What the hell’s going on, anyway? Emptying the basement, what’s that all about?”

  “It’s all got to go, they say. Apart from us, the archive, stolen-goods storage, the mail department, and the Burial Club. It’s all to do with the police reform. Two steps forward, then back to square one.”

  They were going to have so much room they’d never be able to find each other.

  Carl turned to face Rose. “What have you got for us? Who are the two women from the accident, and what are their conditions?”

  She gave a shrug. “Oh, that. I haven’t got around to that yet. There was all Yrsa’s stuff to sort out first. Did you want it in a hurry, like?”

  From the corner of his eye, Carl glimpsed Assad’s hand shoot into the air in an averting gesture. It meant: Careful, or she’ll go off in a huff again. Carl counted to ten under his breath.

  Stupid bloody woman! Had she really not done what she’d been asked? Is this what it was going to be like again?

  “I do beg your pardon, Rose,” he said, gathering all his cool. “In future, we shall endeavor to make our needs more abundantly clear. Now, would you be so kind as to find the information we need right away? It’s rather important, you see, so in a hurry would indeed be just the ticket.”

  He nodded faintly in the direction of Assad, who responded with a thumbs-up.

  Rose tossed her head, seemingly at a loss for what to say.

  So this was how she had to be tackled.

  “By the way, you’ve got an appointment with the psychologist in three minutes, in case it had slipped your mind,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I’d get my skates on if I were you.”

  “What for?”

  She handed him a slip of paper with an address on it. “If you run, you might just make it. Mona Ibsen said to tell you she was proud you’re going through with it.”

  That did it. There was no shying away now.

  Anker Heegaards Gade was only two streets from Police HQ, but still far enough away for Carl to feel like someone had stuffed a vacuum pump into his gob with the sole intention of collapsing his lungs. If this was Mona’s idea of doing him a favor, he might have to have a word with her.

  “Glad you could make it,” said Kris the psychologist. “Was it hard to find?”

  What was he supposed to say? It was two streets away. Aliens Division. He must have been there a thousand times.

  But what was this shrink doing there?

  “Only joking, Carl. I’m in no doubt there’s little you wouldn’t be capable of finding. And now you’re probably wondering what I’m doing here, in this building. Actually, a lot of work here in the Aliens Division requires the services of a psychologist. But you realize that, obviously.”<
br />
  The bloke was giving him the creeps. What was he, a mind reader?

  “I’ve got half an hour, max,” said Carl. “We’ve got a job on.”

  He didn’t even need to lie about it.

  “I see.” Kris made a note in his records. “Next time, I’d like you to make sure you can be here for the full session, OK?”

  He produced a folder bulging with documents that must have taken two hours at least to get photocopied.

  “Do you know what this is? Have you been informed?”

  Carl shook his head, but he could probably hazard a guess.

  “You’ve an inkling, at least. I can see that. These are your records. Basic data and all documents pertaining to the incident in which you and your colleagues were shot in that allotment house in Amager. I ought at this point to tell you that I am also in possession of certain information which I am unfortunately not at liberty to divulge in full.”

  “You what?”

  “Reports from both Hardy Henningsen and Anker Høyer, with whom you were working on the case in question. Reports that seem to indicate that your knowledge of the case was rather more extensive than theirs.”

  “Not to my mind, it wasn’t. Why would they say that? We were together on that job from day one.”

  “This is one of the things we might shed a bit more light on during the course of our sessions. My feeling is there’s something that’s got you in a jam here, something you’ve either suppressed completely or don’t want to let out into the open.”

  Carl shook his head. What the fuck was this? Was he being accused of something?

  “I can assure you there’s no jam, as you put it,” he said, his cheeks fiery with annoyance. “It was a normal case like any other. Apart from the fact that we got shot. What are you getting at?”

  “Do you know why you continue to react so strongly to the shooting, such a long time after the event, Carl?”

  “Yes, I do. And you’d fucking react the same way, too, if you’d been a millimeter from getting blasted to pieces while two of your best mates weren’t quite so lucky.”