The Keeper of Lost Causes (4 page)

She sat down in front of him, trying to catch his eye. “Hey there, mister, are you sitting here watching TV and mooning over that cute newscaster Trine Sick?”

He scrunched up his face so his crow’s feet reached his hairline, but his eyes never left the screen.

“You’re a real rascal, you know that?” Then she took his hand. It was warm and soft, as always. “But you like Lotte Mejlhede better. Do you think I haven’t noticed?”

Now she saw his lips slowly widen into a grin. Contact was established. Oh yes, Uffe was still inside there. And Uffe knew full well what he wanted in life.

She turned to look at the TV screen and listened to the last two reports on the evening news. The first had to do with the Nutrition Council’s appeal to institute a ban on industrially manufactured trans-fatty acids; the second was about the hopeless marketing campaign conducted by the Danish Poultry Association with government financing. She was only too familiar with the issues. They had resulted in two long nights of intense work.

She turned to Uffe and ruffled his hair so that the big scar on his scalp became visible. “Come on, lazybones, let’s see about getting ourselves some dinner.” With her free hand she grabbed one of the sofa cushions and slapped it against the back of his neck until he started shrieking with joy and flailing his arms and legs. Then she let go of his hair, leaped like a mountain goat over the sofa, through the living room and out to the stairwell. It never failed. Hooting and chuckling with glee and stifled energy, Uffe followed close on her heels. Like a couple of train carriages connected by spring steel, they raced upstairs, down again, outside to the front of the garage, back to the living room, and finally out to the kitchen. Soon they would sit down in front of the TV to eat the food that the home help had cooked for them. Yesterday they had watched
Mr. Bean
. The day before it was Chaplin. Today it would be
Mr. Bean
again. The video collection that Merete and Uffe owned included only what Uffe enjoyed watching. He usually lasted half an hour before he fell asleep. Then she would spread a blanket over him and let him sleep on the sofa. Later in the night he would find his own way upstairs to the bedroom. There he would take her hand and grunt a bit before falling asleep beside her in the double bed. When he was finally sound asleep, making soft whistling noises, she would turn on the light and start getting ready for the next day.

That was how the evenings and nights unfolded. Because that was how Uffe loved things to be — her sweet, innocent little brother. Sweet, silent Uffe.

It was true that a
brass plate on the door was engraved with the words “Department Q,” but the door itself had been lifted off its hinges and was now leaning against a bunch of hot-water pipes that stretched all the way down the long basement corridor. Ten buckets, half filled and giving off paint fumes, still stood inside the room that was supposed to be his office. From the ceiling hung four fluorescent lights, the type that after a while would provoke a splitting headache. But the walls were fine — except for the color. It was hard not to make a comparison with hospitals in Eastern Europe.

“Viva, Marcus Jacobsen,” grumbled Carl, trying to get a grip on the situation.

For the last hundred yards along the basement corridor he hadn’t seen a soul. In his end of the basement there were no people, there was no daylight, air, or anything else that might distinguish the place from the Gulag Archipelago. Nothing was more natural than to compare his domain with the fourth circle of hell.

He looked down at his two spanking-new computers and the bundle of wires attached to them. Apparently the information superhighway had been split up so that the intranet was linked to one computer and the rest of the world to the other. He patted computer number two. Here he could sit for hours and surf the Net to his heart’s content. No pesky rules about secure surfing and safeguarding the central servers; at least that was something. He looked around for an ashtray and tapped a cigarette out of the pack. “Smoking is extremely hazardous to you and those around you,” it said on the label. He glanced around. The few termites that might thrive down here could probably handle it. He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. There was definitely a certain advantage to being head of his own department.

“We’ll send the cases down to you,” Marcus Jacobsen had said, but there wasn’t so much as a single sheet of A5 paper on the desk, and all the shelves were empty. They must have thought he needed time to settle into the place. But Carl didn’t mind; he wasn’t about to work on anything until the spirit happened to move him.

He shoved the chair sideways over to the desk, sat down, and propped his feet up on the corner. That was how he’d sat for most of the time he’d been off on sick leave. During the first few weeks at home he’d simply stared into space, smoking cigarettes and trying not to think about the weight of Hardy’s heavy, paralyzed body or the rattling sound that Anker had made before he died. After that he’d surfed the Internet. Aimlessly, without any sort of plan, just trying to numb his mind. That was exactly what he intended to do now. He looked at his watch. He had just about five hours to kill before he could go home.

Carl lived in Allerød, which had been his wife’s choice. They’d moved there a couple of years before she walked out on him and moved into a cottage in an allotment garden in Islev. She’d looked at a map of Zealand and quickly worked out that if you wanted to have it all, you needed plenty of dough in the bank — or else you could move to Allerød. Nice little town on the S-train line, surrounded by fields, with forested land “within walking distance,” as they say. It had lots of pleasant shops, a cinema, theater, social groups, and, to top it all, the house was located in the Rønneholt Park development. His wife had been ecstatic. For a reasonable price they could buy a semidetached house made from stacked-up breeze blocks with plenty of room for both of them, as well as her son. They would even have access to tennis courts, an indoor swimming pool, and a community center, all in the proximity of fields of grain, a marsh, and a hell of a lot of good neighbors. Because she’d read that in Rønneholt Park everyone cared about each other. Back then that hadn’t been a plus as far as Carl was concerned, because who the hell believed that sort of crap anyway? But later on it had turned out to be important. Without his friends in Rønneholt Park, Carl would have fallen flat on his ass. Both metaphorically and literally. First his wife took off. Then she decided she didn’t want a divorce, but instead took up residence in the allotment garden. Next she went through a whole series of young lovers, and she had the bad habit of ringing Carl to tell him all about them. Then her son refused to keep living with her in the garden cottage, and in the full throes of puberty had moved back in with Carl. And finally there was the shooting out in Amager, which brought to a screeching halt everything that Carl had been clinging to: a solid purpose in life and a couple of good colleagues who didn’t give a damn whether he’d gotten out of bed on the wrong side or not. No, if it hadn’t been for Rønneholt Park and the people who lived there, he would have really been up shit creek.

When Carl got home, he leaned his bicycle against the shed outside the kitchen, noting that the other two occupants of the house were both there. As usual, his lodger, Morten Holland, had turned the volume all the way up as he listened to opera in the basement, while his stepson’s downloaded blowtorch heavy metal was blasting out of a window upstairs. A less compatible collage of sounds was not to be found anywhere else on the planet.

He forced his way inside the inferno and stomped a couple of times on the floor. Down in the basement
Rigoletto
was instantly wrapped up in cotton wool. It wasn’t that simple with the boy upstairs. Carl took the stairs in three bounds and didn’t bother to knock on the door.

“Jesper, for God’s sake! The sound waves have shattered two windows down on Pinjevangen. And you’re the one who’s going to pay for them!” he shouted as loud as he could.

The boy had heard the same story before, so he didn’t move a muscle as he hunched over the computer keyboard.

“Hey!” yelled Carl, right in his ear. “Turn it down or I’ll cut the ADSL cable.”

That got a reaction.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Morten had already set plates on the table. Someone in the neighborhood had once labeled him the surrogate mother at number 73, but that wasn’t right. Morten was not a surrogate; he was a real housewife and the best that Carl had ever encountered. He took care of the grocery shopping and laundry, the cooking and cleaning, while opera arias trilled from his sensitive lips. And to cap it all, he even paid rent.

“Did you go to the university today?” asked Carl, knowing what the answer would be. Morten was thirty-three years old, and he’d spent the past thirteen of those years diligently studying all kinds of subjects other than the ones having any direct bearing on the three degree programs in which he was officially enrolled. The result was an overwhelming knowledge about everything except the subjects for which he was receiving financial support and which in the future would presumably earn him a living.

Morten turned his heavy, corpulent back to Carl and stared down the bubbling mass in the pot on the stove. “I’ve decided to study political science.”

He’d mentioned that before; it was just a matter of time before he tried that subject too. “Jesus, Morten, don’t you think you should finish your economics degree first?” Carl couldn’t help asking.

Morten tossed some salt into the pot and began stirring. “Almost everybody in economics votes for the government parties, and that’s just not me.”

“How the hell do you know that? You never even go to class, Morten.”

“I was there yesterday. I told my fellow students a joke about Karina Jensen.”

“A joke about a politician who started out as an extreme left-winger and ended up joining the Liberal Party? Shouldn’t be hard to make a joke about that.”

“‘She’s an example of how to hide a Neanderthal behind a high-brow,’ I said. And nobody laughed.”

Morten was different. An overgrown adolescent and androgynous virgin whose personal relationships consisted of remarks exchanged with random supermarket customers about what they were buying. A little chat by the freezer section about whether spinach was best with or without cream sauce.

“What does it matter if nobody laughed, Morten? There could be lots of reasons for that. I didn’t laugh either, and I don’t vote for the government parties, in case you’d like to know.” Carl shook his head. He knew it was no use. But as long as Morten kept on making a good salary at the video store, it really didn’t matter what the hell he studied or didn’t study. “Political science, eh? Sounds deadly boring.”

Morten shrugged as he sliced a couple of carrots and added them to what was cooking in the pot. He didn’t say anything for a moment, which was unusual for him. Carl knew what was coming.

“Vigga phoned,” said Morten at last with a hint of concern in his voice. In this situation he normally added in English: “Don’t shoot me. I’m just the piano player.” But this time he didn’t say it.

Carl didn’t reply. If Vigga wanted something from him, she could wait to call until he got home.

“I think she’s freezing over there in that garden cottage,” Morten ventured as he shoved the spoon around in the pot.

Carl turned to face him. It smelled damned good, whatever Morten was cooking on the stove. It had been a long time since he’d had such an appetite. “She’s freezing? Maybe she should stuff a couple of her well-fed lovers into the woodstove.”

“What are you guys talking about?” said a voice in the doorway. Behind Jesper, the cacophony from upstairs was again blasting from his room, making the walls in the hallway vibrate.

It was a miracle they could hear each other at all.

Carl spent three days staring alternately at Google and at the walls in the basement room. He’d made himself familiar ad nauseam with the walk down the hall to the toilet, and realized he felt more rested than ever before. Then he counted off the four hundred and fifty-two paces up to the homicide division on the third floor, which was the domain of his former colleagues. He was going to demand that the workmen finish what they were doing in the basement and hang the door back on its hinges so he would at least have something to slam if he was so inclined. And then he would circumspectly remind them that he hadn’t yet received the promised case files. Not because there was any rush, but he had no intention of losing his job before he’d even started.

Maybe he’d expected his former colleagues to stare at him with curiosity when he entered the homicide premises. Was he on the verge of a breakdown? Had his face lost all color after his sojourn in the eternal gloom? He’d expected inquisitive and also scornful looks, but not that everyone would simultaneously slip inside their offices with such a well-orchestrated closing of doors.

“What’s going on here?” he asked a man he’d never seen before who was unpacking moving boxes in the first office.

The man held out his hand. “Peter Vestervig. I’m from City Station. I’m going to be part of Viggo’s team.”

“Viggo’s team? Viggo Brink?” Carl asked. A team leader? Viggo? He must have been appointed the day before.

“That’s right. And you are?” the man asked.

Carl managed a brief handshake and then glanced around the office without replying. There were two other faces he didn’t recognize. “They’re on Viggo’s team too?”

“Not the one over by the window.”

“New furniture, I see.”

“Yes, they just brought it up. Aren’t you Carl Mørck?”

“I used to be,” he said and then walked the rest of the way over to Marcus Jacobsen’s office.