The Keeper of Lost Causes (37 page)

Carl shook his head at himself. Had he really forgotten to compare the lists of phone calls? Damned if he wasn’t going to have to start making notes for himself before Alzheimer’s Lite took over.

“Of course,” he replied in an authoritative tone. In that way they might be able to establish a timeline in communication that showed a pattern in the course of the relationship between Merete and the Daniel Hale impostor.

“But you know what, Carl? It will take a couple of days, and Lis does not have time right now. She says that it will be fairly so difficult after such a long time then. Maybe it cannot even be done.” Assad looked downright mournful.

“Tell me now, Assad. Who do you know that does such nice work?” said Carl, weighing Merete’s appointment diary in his hand.

But Assad refused.

Carl was just about to explain that this sort of secrecy wasn’t helping his chances of keeping his job, but then the phone rang.

It was the director from Egely, and his disdain for Carl practically dripped out of the receiver. “I want you to know that Uffe Lynggaard took off a short time after your utterly insane assault on him last Friday. We have no idea where he is right now. The police in Frederikssund have been alerted, but if anything serious happens to him, Carl Mørck, I promise I am going to torment you for the rest of your career.”

Then he slammed down the phone, leaving Carl in a thundering void.

Two minutes later the homicide chief called and asked Carl to come upstairs to his office. He didn’t need to elaborate; Carl recognized the tone.

He’d been summoned. Now.

The nightmare started as soon
as he passed the newsstand outside the Allerød station, headed for work. The expanded Easter issue of
Gossip
had come out a week early, and even those who had only a passing acquaintance with Carl now knew that it was his photo, Deputy Detective Superintendent Carl Mørck, that graced a corner of the front page, right under the lead story about the impending wedding of the Danish prince and his French sweetheart.

A couple of locals moved aside in embarrassment as they bought sandwiches and fruit. “Police Detective Threatens Journalist” screamed the headline. And underneath in smaller letters it said: “The Truth about the Fatal Shots.”

The clerk seemed truly disappointed when Carl chose not to personally invest his hard-earned money in a copy of
Gossip
. But he’d be damned if he’d contribute even one øre to Pelle Hyttested’s livelihood.

Quite a few people on the train stared at Carl, and again he felt the pressure settling in his rib cage.

Things didn’t get better at police headquarters. He’d finished the previous workday listening to the homicide chief reprimand him because of Uffe’s disappearance. Now he was summoned upstairs again.

“What are you staring at, you morons?” he snarled as he walked past a couple of colleagues who didn’t exactly look as if they were aggrieved on his behalf.

“Well, Carl. The question is: What are we going to do with you?” said Marcus Jacobsen. “I’m afraid that next week I’ll be seeing headlines saying you’ve been psychologically terrorizing some poor handicapped person. I’m sure you realize that the media is going to have a field day if anything happens to Uffe Lynggaard.” He pointed at the newspaper. There was a picture of a scowling Carl, taken years earlier at a crime scene. Carl recalled how he’d kicked the press out of the cordoned-off area, and how furious the journalists had been.

“So let me ask again: What are we going to do with you, Carl?”

Carl picked up the tabloid with annoyance and scanned the text in the center of the yellow-and-red layout splotches. They really knew how to drag a man through the mud, those gossip-spewing, low-life reporters.

“I never made any sort of statement about the case to anyone at
Gossip
,” he said. “All I said was that I would have gladly given up my own life for Hardy and Anker. That’s it. Just ignore it, Marcus, or get our lawyers to go after them.”

He tossed the tabloid on the desk and stood up. Now he’d given his testimony, and it was the truth. What the hell was Marcus going to do about it? Fire him? That would certainly produce some more good headlines.

His boss gave him a resigned look. “The crime program on Channel 2 called. They want to talk to you. I told them to forget it.”

“OK,” replied Carl. His boss probably didn’t dare do otherwise.

“They asked me if there was anything to the
Gossip
story about you and the shooting episode out in Amager.”

“Is that right? Then I’d like to hear what you told them.”

“I said that the whole thing was pure bullshit.”

“OK, that’s good.” Carl nodded doggedly. “Is that what you really think?”

“Carl, I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to listen carefully. You’ve been on the force for a long time now. How many times during your career have you seen a colleague being pushed into a corner? Think about the very first time you were a cop on the night beat in Randers, or wherever the hell it was, and all of a sudden you found yourself face to face with a bunch of shit-faced farmboys who didn’t like your uniform. Do you remember what that felt like? Then, as the years pass, situations come up that are a hundred times worse. I’ve been through it. Lars Bjørn and Bak have been through it. And plenty of former colleagues who now make their living doing something else have been through it too. Life-threatening situations. With axes and hammers, metal rods, knives, broken beer bottles, shotguns, and all sorts of weapons. How many times can a person handle that sort of situation, and when does he decide he just can’t take it anymore? Who knows? It’s impossible to predict, don’t you think? We’ve all been up shit creek at one time or another. Anyone who hasn’t is not a real cop. We just have to go out there, knowing that we might be out of our depth once in a while. That’s our job.”

Carl nodded, feeling the pressure in his chest take on a new form. “So what’s the verdict on all this, boss?” he said, pointing at the tabloid. “What do you have to say about it? What do you think?”

The homicide chief looked at Carl with a calm expression. Without saying a word, he got up and opened the window facing Tivoli. Next he picked up the newspaper, bent over, and pretended to wipe his backside with it. Then he tossed the whole mess out into the street.

He couldn’t have been more explicit about his opinion.

Carl felt a smile tugging at his lips. Some pedestrian down on the street below was going to be the lucky recipient of a free copy of the TV schedule.

He nodded to his boss. Marcus’s reaction had actually been quite touching.

“I’m close to having new information in the Lynggaard case,” he said in return, and waited to be given permission to leave.

Jacobsen nodded back with a certain show of approval. It was in these sorts of situations that he demonstrated why he was so well liked, and why he’d been able to hold on to the same beautiful woman for more than thirty years. “Just remember that you still haven’t signed up for the management course, Carl,” Jacobsen interjected. “And you need to do that in the next two days. Do you hear me?”

Carl nodded, but didn’t mean anything by it. If his boss was going to insist that he take the course, Marcus would first have to deal with the union.

The four minutes that it took Carl to walk from the homicide chief’s office down to the basement were a gauntlet of scornful looks and disapproving attitude. You’re a disgrace to us all, said some of those eyes. But I don’t give a shit, he thought. They should be giving him their support instead; then he probably wouldn’t have this feeling of a big fat ax hacking into his chest.

Even Assad had seen the article, but at least he gave Carl a pat on the back. He thought the picture on the front page was nicely in focus, but the tabloid cost too much.

It was refreshing to hear a different point of view.

At ten o’clock sharp the phone rang; it was from “the cage,” the front desk at police headquarters. “There’s a man here who says he has an appointment with you, Carl,” said the duty officer coldly. “Are you expecting somebody named John Rasmussen?”

“Yes, send him down.”

Five minutes later they heard hesitant footsteps out in the corridor and then a cautious “Hello, is anybody here?”

Carl forced himself to get up. In the doorway he came face to face with an anachronism wearing an Icelandic sweater, corduroy trousers, and the whole hippie outfit.

“I’m John Rasmussen, the one who was a teacher at the Godhavn children’s home. We have an appointment,” he said, holding out his hand with a sly expression. “Hey, wasn’t that your picture on the front page of one of the tabloids today?”

It was enough to drive you mad. Dressed in that sort of get-up, the man really should have known better than to stare.

After that they quickly established that John Rasmussen did remember Atomos, and then they agreed to go over the case before they took a tour of police headquarters. That would allow Carl the chance to get off with giving him a mini-tour of the ground floor and a brief look out in the courtyards.

The man seemed pleasant enough, if a bit long-winded. Not at all the type that delinquent boys would have the patience to put up with, in Carl’s opinion. But there were probably still a few things that Carl didn’t know about delinquent boys.

“I’ll fax you what we have about him up at the home; I’ve already arranged with the office staff that it would be OK. But I have to tell you that there isn’t much. Atomos’s case file disappeared a few years ago, and when we finally found it behind a bookshelf, at least half of the documents were missing.” He shook his head, making the loose skin under his chin wobble.

“Why did he end up in your institution?”

Rasmussen shrugged. “Problems on the home front, you know. And he’d been placed with a foster family that probably wasn’t the best choice. Which can provoke a reaction, and sometimes things go too far. He was apparently a good kid, but he wasn’t given enough challenges and he was too smart. And that makes for an ugly combination. You see kids like that everywhere in the ghettos where the foreign workers live. They’re practically exploding with untapped energy, those young people.”

“Was he mixed up in any sort of criminal activity?”

“I suppose he was, in a sense, but I think it was only minor stuff. I mean, OK, he had a fierce temper, but I don’t remember him being at Godhavn because of anything violent. No, I don’t recall anything like that, but it was twenty years ago, after all.”

Carl pulled his notepad closer. “I’m going to ask you a few quick questions, and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your answers brief. If you can’t answer a question, we’ll just move on. You can always go back to it, if you think of an answer later. OK?”

The man gave a friendly nod to Assad, who offered him one of his viscous, burning-hot substances in a dainty little cup decorated with gold flowers. Rasmussen accepted the cup with a smile. He was going to regret it.

Then he turned to look at Carl. “OK,” he said. “I understand.”

“What’s the boy’s real name?”

“I think it was Lars Erik or Lars Henrik, or something like that. He had a very common last name. I think it was Petersen, but I’ll tell you in my fax.”

“Why was he called Atomos?”

“It was a nickname his father had given him. Apparently he really looked up to his father, who’d died a few years earlier. I think his father was an engineer and had something to do with the nuclear research station at Risø, or someplace like that. But I’m sure you can find out more details when you have the boy’s name and CR number.”

“Do you still have his CR number?”

“Yes. It disappeared with the other documents from his file, but we had a bookkeeping system that was linked to funding from the municipalities and the national government, so the number has been restored to his file.”

“How long was he in your institution?”

“I think he was there about three or four years.”

“That was a long time, considering his age, wasn’t it?”

“Yes and no. That’s how it goes sometimes. It wasn’t possible to find another place for him in the system. He refused to live with a new foster family, and his own family wasn’t able to look after him until then.”

“Have you heard from him since? Do you know what happened to him?”

“I happened to see him, just by chance, some years later, and he seemed to be doing fine. I think it was in Helsingør. He was apparently working as a steward or a first mate, or something like that. He was wearing a uniform, at any rate.”

“You mean, he was a seaman?”

“Yes, I think so. Something along that line.”

I have to get hold of the crew list for the
Schleswig-Holstein
ferry from Scandlines, Carl said to himself, wondering if it had ever been requisitioned. Again he saw Bak’s conscience-stricken face before him from last Thursday, when they were sitting in Marcus Jacobsen’s office.

“Just a minute,” he said to Rasmussen, and then told Assad to go upstairs and find Bak. He needed to ask him whether they’d ever received a list of personnel on the ferry that Merete Lynggaard had taken. And if so, where was it now?

“Merete Lynggaard? Is this about her?” asked the man, his eyes sparkling like Christmas lights. He took a big gulp of the syrupy tea.

Carl gave him a smile that radiated how incredibly pleased he was to be asked that question. Then he went back to his own questions, without replying.

“Did the boy have psychotic tendencies? Do you remember if he was able to show empathy?”

The teacher looked at his empty cup as if he were still thirsty. Apparently he was one of those people whose taste buds had been tempered back in the macrobiotic days. Then he raised his gray eyebrows. “A lot of the boys who come to us are emotionally abnormal. Of course some of them are given a medical diagnosis, but I don’t remember that happening with Atomos. I do think he was able to show empathy. At least he worried about his mother a lot.”