A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  42

  They had been sitting in the waiting area for half an hour while the Intensive Care Unit was in turmoil.

  Carl got to his feet and went up to the desk. They couldn’t wait any longer.

  “You wouldn’t have any information on Lisa Karin Krogh, would you? The woman who died just now?” he inquired, producing his badge again for the secretary. “I need a phone number for her home address.”

  A moment later he stood with a note in his hand.

  He took his mobile out of his pocket and went back to Assad, who sat tapping his feet as though they were a pair of drumsticks.

  “Stay here and hold the fort,” he said. “I’ll be out by the lifts. Give us a shout when they say we can go in, OK?”

  Then he called Rose. “I need some info relating to this number. Names, civil registration numbers of everyone belonging to the address, OK? And Rose, I want you to do it right away, are you with me?”

  She huffed a bit but said she would see what she could come up with.

  He pushed the button for the lift and went down to the ground floor.

  He must have passed the cafeteria fifty times over the years without ever stopping. All that fattening smørrebrød at overinflated prices. This time was no different. He was hungry, certainly, but he had a different agenda.

  “Karsten Jønsson!” he called out, before catching sight of the fair-haired man craning his neck to see who wanted him.

  Carl asked him to come along, and as they walked he explained what had happened upstairs after Jønsson was made to go down and wait.

  Concern swept across the man’s face.

  “Just a sec,” said Carl as they reached the third floor and his mobile chimed. “You just go in, Karsten. Come and get me if you need to.”

  He kneeled down by the wall, wedged the mobile against his ear, and placed his notepad on the floor in front of him. “OK, Rose, what have you got for me?”

  She stated the address, and then seven names and their respective civil registration numbers. Father, mother, and five children: Josef, eighteen years old, Samuel, sixteen, Miriam, fourteen, Magdalena, twelve, and Sarah, ten. He wrote it all down.

  Was there anything more he needed to know?

  He shook his head and snapped the phone shut without having answered her properly.

  The information was alarming, indeed.

  Five children, now orphaned, two of them almost certainly in grave danger. Same pattern as before. The kidnapper had struck a family strongly affiliated to a religious group and with more children than average. The only difference now was there would be little chance of him sparing one of the kidnapped children as was his usual MO. What reason would he have?

  Carl felt himself on the brink of a life and death situation. All his instincts were now on alert. Further killings were imminent. He needed to prevent them, and an entire family’s demise. There was no time to waste, but what was he to do? Apart from the dead woman’s children and the medical secretary with whom the killer had spoken, now on her way home with her mobile switched off, the only person who could help was in a room beyond these double doors. Unable to see or speak and in a critical state of shock.

  The killer had been here today. A nurse had seen him, but she was still unconscious. It was a truly hopeless situation.

  He consulted his notes and dialed the number of the house in Frederiks. At moments like this, his job was unbearable.

  “Josef speaking,” said a voice. Carl glanced at his notepad. The eldest child. Thank God for small mercies.

  “Hello, Josef. You’re speaking to Detective Inspector Carl Mørck, Department Q of the Copenhagen Police. I’m calling because—”

  The receiver was put down gently at the other end.

  Carl stood for a moment and considered his error. He shouldn’t have presented himself like that. The police had doubtless been there already and informed the children of their father’s death. Josef and his siblings would be in shock. What was he thinking?

  He stared at the floor. How could he get the boy talking ASAP?

  Then he called Rose.

  “Grab your handbag, Rose,” he said. “Then grab a taxi and get over here to the Rigshospital as fast as you can.”

  “Very regrettable indeed,” said the consultant. “Until the day before yesterday, we had a police officer posted to the unit around the clock. We’ve had victims in here from the gang war. If he’d been here today, this probably wouldn’t have happened. Unfortunately, one might say, our two gangsters were transferred elsewhere on Monday evening.”

  Carl listened attentively. The doctor’s face was kind. No airs and graces there.

  “Of course, we fully understand that the police need to establish this intruder’s identity as quickly as possible, and naturally we shall do whatever we can to assist. But I’m afraid the condition of the nurse who was attacked remains such that as a doctor I’m compelled to say that concern for her health must take precedence. There may be a cervical fracture here, and certainly at the moment she’s in a state of shock. So you won’t be able to see her until sometime tomorrow morning at the earliest, I’m afraid. In the meantime, we’ll do all we can to get in touch with the secretary who saw the assailant earlier on. She lives in Ishøj, I believe, so she might well be home in about twenty minutes or so, providing she doesn’t stop off on the way.”

  “We’ve already got a man waiting at her address so as not to waste time. But what about Isabel Jønsson?” Carl glanced inquiringly at her brother and received a nod in return. It was OK by him for Carl to do the asking.

  “Yes, well. Understandably, she’s very distraught. Respiration and heart rate are both still rather unstable, but our view is that she may benefit from seeing her brother. We’ll be finished examining her in five or ten minutes, so he’ll be able to look in on her then.”

  Carl heard a commotion by the entrance doors. Rose’s bag trying to bring the curtains in with it.

  “Right, thanks,” Carl said, then gestured for Assad and Rose to follow him outside.

  “What do you need me for?” asked Rose once they were gathered in the corridor. All her body language said the last place in the world she wanted to be was standing by some lifts outside an intensive care unit. Maybe she had a problem with hospitals.

  “I’ve got a difficult job for you,” said Carl.

  “You what?” she replied, ready to dig her heels in.

  “I want you to call a young lad and make him understand that he must help us right away or else a couple of his siblings are going to end up dead. That’s what it looks like, anyway. His name’s Josef and he’s eighteen years old. His father died yesterday, and his mother is here in Intensive Care. I’m assuming he’s already been told that by the police in Viborg. What he doesn’t know is that his mother died in that room in there only a short time ago. It would be unethical to give him that message over the phone, but it may be necessary. It’s up to you, Rose. We need him to answer our questions. That’s the bottom line.”

  Rose seemed paralyzed, on the verge of protest, her words somehow stuck in the empty space between apprehension and necessity. She could tell by looking at Carl how urgent it was.

  “But why me? Why not Assad, or you?”

  He explained to her that the boy had hung up on him. “We need a neutral voice. A gentle woman’s voice, like yours.”

  Had he referred to Rose’s voice that way at any other time, he would never have been able to keep a straight face. But right now there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to laugh about. It was imperative that she do as instructed.

  He told her what he needed to know, then he and Assad retreated to give her space.

  It was the first time he had seen Rose nervous. Maybe Yrsa would have been better. Somehow, the toughest ones were always the softies inside.

  They watched from a distance as she spoke, raising her hand slightly as though to prevent the boy from putting the phone down on her. More than once she pressed her lips together and tu
rned her eyes to the ceiling, as though trying not to break down and cry. It was an unsettling sight to behold. A life was collapsing at the other end of the phone. What Rose had told the boy meant that his own life and that of his siblings would never be the same again. Carl understood only too well what she had to contend with.

  And then she was listening, deep in concentration, drying her eyes at the same time. Breathing deeper now. Putting forward her questions, one by one. Allowing the boy time to answer. Then, after a few minutes, she waved Carl over.

  She covered the receiver with her hand. “He won’t talk to you, only to me. He’s very, very upset. But he’ll answer your questions.”

  “You’ve done very well, Rose, both of you. Have you asked him the things we agreed on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have we got a description and a name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything that might lead us directly to our man?”

  She shook her head.

  Carl put his hand to his brow. “In that case, I don’t think I’ve anything more to ask him right now. Give him your number and tell him to call if he remembers anything that might be significant.”

  She nodded, and Carl withdrew.

  “Nothing to go on,” he said, leaning back against the wall with a sigh. “This is serious, Assad.”

  “We shall find him,” Assad replied reassuringly. But most likely he was quite as apprehensive as Carl. Afraid they wouldn’t make it in time to save the children.

  “Just give me a minute,” said Rose, when she had finished the call.

  She gazed emptily into space, as though it were the first time she had seen the world’s dark underbelly, and now she never wanted to again.

  She stood for quite some time, immersed in her own thoughts as tears welled in her eyes. Carl found himself willing his watch to tick slower.

  She swallowed a couple of times. “OK, I’m ready,” she said eventually. “The kidnapper has Josef’s brother and sister. Samuel and Magdalena. They were abducted on Saturday, and their mother and father were trying to get a ransom together. Isabel Jønsson wanted to help them, though Josef wasn’t quite sure how she came into the picture. She only appeared on Monday. That was all he knew. His parents didn’t tell him much.”

  “What about the kidnapper?”

  “Josef described the man just like he is on the police sketch. Forty-plus, perhaps a little taller than average. Nothing characteristic about the way he walks or anything like that. Josef reckons he dyes his hair and eyebrows and that he probably knows all sorts of stuff about theological issues.” She stared into space again. “If I ever get my hands on that animal, I’ll…” The sentence tapered off. Her face said it all.

  Who was with the children now, Carl wanted to know.

  “Someone from their church.”

  “How did Josef take his mother’s death?”

  She waved a hand in front of her face. She didn’t want to talk about it. Not yet, anyway.

  “And he said the man couldn’t sing,” she went on, her black-painted lips quivering. “He’d heard him sing at their prayer meetings, and he was no good at it. He drove a van. Not a diesel, I asked about that. At least, it didn’t sound like a diesel engine, is what he said. A light-blue van, nondescript. He didn’t know the registration or what make it was. He’s not into cars.”

  “Was that the lot?”

  “The man calls himself Lars Sørensen, but Josef remembered calling him by name once to get his attention and it was like there was no reaction at first, so he reckons his proper name is something else.”

  Carl wrote it down on his pad.

  “What about that scar?”

  “He hadn’t noticed any.” She pressed her lips together. “So it can’t be that visible.”

  “Anything else?”

  She shook her head. Her eyes told how sad she was.

  “Thanks, Rose. See you tomorrow. You can go home now.”

  Rose nodded but stayed put. She probably needed more time to get herself together.

  He turned to Assad. “Only our patient in there can help us now, Assad.”

  They stepped quietly into the room. Karsten Jønsson was speaking softly to his sister. A nurse busied herself with something at Isabel’s wrist. The beeping from the panel above her bed indicated her heart rate was normal and that she had now calmed down.

  Carl’s gaze fell on the bed next to Isabel’s. A white sheet with a shape underneath. Not a loving mother of five, a woman who had died in terrible grief. Just a shape beneath a sheet. A split second in a hurtling car, and here she lay. Everything gone.

  “May we step closer?” he asked Karsten Jønsson.

  The man nodded. “Isabel wants to talk, but we’re having difficulty understanding what she’s trying to say. A pointing board’s no use at the moment, so the nurse is trying to loosen the bandages around the fingers of her right hand. Isabel has fractures in both forearms and several fingers, so she might not be able to hold a pencil at all.”

  Carl looked over the figure lying in front of him in the bed. Her chin was the same as her brother’s, but otherwise there was no way to tell what this battered person might look like.

  “Hello, Isabel. I’m Detective Inspector Carl Mørck, Department Q, Copenhagen Police. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Mmmmm,” came the response, and the nurse nodded.

  “Let me just explain to you briefly why I’m here, Isabel.” He told her about the message in the bottle and about the other kidnappings, and that he now knew that this was a case of the same kind. Everyone in the room noted how the monitors showed her reaction to what he was saying.

  “I’m sorry you have to listen to all this, Isabel. I know you’re not feeling too good as it is, but I’m afraid there’s no getting around it. Am I right in believing that you and Lisa Krogh are involved in a case like the one with the message in the bottle I just told you about?”

  She nodded faintly and made sounds she needed to repeat more than once before her brother straightened his back and looked up. “I think she’s saying the woman’s name is Rachel.”

  “That’s right,” said Carl. “She took another name for use in her community. We’re aware of that.”

  Isabel responded with a slight nod.

  “Am I right in thinking that on Monday you and Rachel were involved in an attempt to save Rachel’s two children, Samuel and Magdalena, and that the car crash you were involved in occurred during this attempt?”

  Isabel’s lips quivered. Then another faint nod.

  “We’re going to put a pencil in your hand now, Isabel. Your brother’s right here if you need help.” The nurse encouraged her to grasp the pencil, but Isabel’s fingers would not obey.

  The nurse glanced up at Carl and shook her head.

  “This isn’t going to work,” said her brother.

  “Let me try,” said Assad from the rear of the room and stepped forward.

  “My father was struck by aphasia when I was ten years old. There was a clot, and all his words were gone. I was the only one who could understand him after that, until the day he died.”

  Carl frowned. So the man Assad had been talking to on Skype the other morning hadn’t been his father.

  The nurse gave up her chair to Assad.

  “Yes, I’m sorry, Isabel. My name is Assad and I am from Syria. I am Carl Mørck’s assistant, and now we shall speak together. Carl will speak and I will listen to your mouth, OK?”

  A tiny nod of her head.

  “What kind of car was it that ran you off the road?” Carl asked. “Did you see the make or the color? Was it old or new?”

  Assad put his ear to Isabel’s mouth. His eyes were wide and lively as he listened to each and every breath that passed over her lips.

  “A Mercedes. Dark. Rather old,” he repeated.

  “Do you remember the registration number, Isabel?” Carl asked.

  If she could, there was hope.

  “Dirty number pl
ates. She could hardly see in the dark,” Assad said after a while. “The last three digits may have been 433, though Isabel is not certain they were threes. They could have been eights, or both.”

  Carl ran it through in his mind. 433, 438, 483, 488. Only four combinations. That narrowed things down.

  “You got that, Karsten?” he said. “Older Mercedes, dark in color, registration ending 433, 438, 483, or 488. That’d be your department.”

  Karsten Jønsson nodded. “Well, we can find out pretty quickly how many Mercedes there are on the roads with those final digits, but we still haven’t got a color. And Mercedes is a fairly common make, so there could be quite a few with that combination.”

  He was right. Finding the cars was one thing, checking out their owners was quite another. It would take a lot more time than they had.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us that might help, Isabel? A name, perhaps?”

  She nodded again. Now it took longer for her to speak, and getting her words out required obvious effort. More than once, they heard Assad encourage her to repeat what she said.

  Then came the names. Three in all: Mads Christian Fog, Lars Sørensen, Mikkel Laust. Added to the fourth, Freddy Brink, which they knew from the Poul Holt case, and the fifth, Birger Sloth, from the Madsen case, that made a total of eleven first and last names. Not promising.

  “My guess is none of these is his real name,” Carl said. “Most likely we can rule them out.”

  Meanwhile, Assad was still listening to Isabel’s exertions.

  “She says one of the names is on his driver’s license. And she knows where he has been hiding out,” he said all of a sudden.

  Carl straightened up. “You mean she’s got an address?” he asked.

  “Yes, and one thing more,” Assad replied, after another moment of deep concentration. “He had a light-blue van. She has the number in her head.”

  A minute later, they had the registration written down.

  “I’ll get cracking,” said Karsten Jønsson, already halfway through the door.

  “Isabel says the man has an address in a village in Hornsherred,” Assad went on. He turned once more to Isabel. “I cannot quite understand what you are saying the place is called, Isabel. Does the name end on ‘løv’? Something else then? ‘Slev,’ is that what you are saying?”