The Purity of Vengeance (11 page)

Rose confirmed.

“Well, all I said was she loved that cat. There was another girl, I can’t remember her name, who was supposed to look after it once, only she forgot and Rita got dead narked with her and gave her her marching orders. So whenever Rita was away after that, she got me to feed the thing. Tinned food, the good stuff. But it was only ever on its own when she was away for a very short time, a day or two at the most. Left its doings all over the place, it did, but Rita just cleaned up after it.”

“So you’re saying Rita would never have left her cat without making sure there was someone to look after it?” Rose asked, helping her along.

“That’s right, yeah! It was odd at the time. I had no idea the cat was in the flat and she’d never given me a key. She never gave her key out unless there was good reason. Otherwise I’d have known the poor thing was starving to death. Are you with me?”

“Yes, we’re with you, Lone. But the other thing you told me just before, would you say that again, about Madonna?”

“Oh, Rita was absolutely mad about her. Daft, she was.”

“You said Rita was in love with her.”

“Head over bloody heels. She never said as much, but we all knew.”

“So Rita Nielsen was a lesbian?” Carl interjected.

“Ooh, we’ve got a man with us now, have we?” she cackled. “Yeah, well, Rita would shag almost anything that moved, wouldn’t she?” At this point Lone Rasmussen paused suddenly and Rose’s clinical habitat was filled with the sound of a person attempting to quench a boundless thirst. “I don’t think she ever said no, to be honest,” she continued after prolonged gulping. “Only in the days she was doing it for money, and the bloke, or whoever it was, didn’t have any.”

“You don’t think Rita committed suicide, then?” Carl went on.

Lone’s reply was a guttural eruption of laughter, followed by prompt dismissal: “You must be bloody joking.”

“And you’ve no idea what might have happened to her?”

“None whatsoever. Weird, it was. But my guess is it was to do with money, even if she did have loads in the bank when the lawyers finally finished sorting out the estate. Took them eight years, if I remember right.”

“And she left everything including her flat to Cats Protection, isn’t that right?” Rose said.

There you go, Carl thought to himself. A woman like that would never leave her pet to die of starvation.

“Yeah, what a waste that was. I could have done with a couple of her millions myself,” said Lone wistfully.

“OK,” said Carl. “Just to sum up. Rita drove to Copenhagen on the Friday, and your impression was she’d be home again the next day, the Saturday. That’s why she hadn’t asked you to look after the cat. After that, you assumed she slept at home in Kolding on the Saturday night, that she was going to be otherwise engaged during the days that followed, and that you
might
have to look after the cat, though you were unsure as to whether the cat was actually in the flat. Is that right?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“And was this a usual kind of occurrence?”

“It was, yeah. She’d often go off for a few days. A trip to London, maybe, to see the musicals. She liked that. I mean, who wouldn’t? But then she was the one with the money, wasn’t she?”

The last couple of sentences were rather unintelligible. Assad concentrated with his eyes squinched together as though he’d been surprised by a sudden sandstorm, but Carl had little difficulty picking out the words.

“One more thing. Rita bought a packet of smokes on her debit card in Copenhagen the last day anyone saw her alive. Would you have any idea why she didn’t pay in cash? Bearing in mind the small amount.”

Lone Rasmussen guffawed. “The taxman nailed her once with a hundred grand in a drawer at home. Came down hard on her, they did. She couldn’t explain where it came from, could she? After that, every penny went into the bank and she never made a cash withdrawal. Paid for
everything
with her Dankort or Diners. Course, a lot of shops didn’t accept plastic then, but if they didn’t, she’d just go elsewhere. No way she was going to make the same mistake again. And she never did.”

“OK,” said Carl. So that was
that
sorted. “A shame you didn’t get any of her money,” he added, and almost meant it. Most likely it would have been the death of her, but at least she’d have gone out with a bang.

“Well, I did get her furniture and all the stuff from the flat. Cats Protection didn’t want any of it, and all I had was cheap rubbish.”

He could imagine.

They thanked her and concluded the call. They were welcome to get in touch again, she told them.

Carl nodded. It’d give her something to talk about.

Rose scrutinized their expressions and could tell she’d got them interested. There was substance to this, a case that cried out for fresh investigation.

“OK, what else have you got, Rose?” Carl asked. “Out with it.”

“You don’t know much about Madonna, do you, Carl?”

He looked at her wearily for a moment. In the eyes of someone like Rose, who had been a part of this world a good many years less than himself, it seemed that anyone over thirty had already descended into a rut, while being over forty meant never having been young at all. He shuddered to think how eyes like hers perceived a person who was fifty, sixty, or more.

He shrugged. Despite his advanced age he of course knew quite a lot about Madonna. But Rose didn’t need to know how one of his former girlfriends had driven him up the wall with “Material Girl,” or how Vigga had danced in the nude for him, writhing her hips sensually as she wailed the words to “Papa Don’t Preach.” It wasn’t the kind of performance he felt inclined to share with anyone.

“What’s there to know?” he said. “Hasn’t she gone religious these days?”

Rose was far from impressed. “Rita Nielsen set up her call-girl business and massage parlor in Kolding in 1983. She called herself Louise Ciccone on the local porn scene. Doesn’t that ring a bell?”

Assad raised a tentative finger in the air. “Ciccone is a kind of pasta, I think, with meat inside. Very nice.”

She glared at him, indignant. “Madonna’s real name is Madonna Louise Ciccone. Lone Rasmussen told me they played her records all the time in the massage parlor, nothing else would do, and Rita was always trying to copy Madonna’s makeup and hair. At the time she disappeared she had the same Marilyn Monroe peroxide job Madonna sported on her Who’s That Girl tour. See for yourselves!”

She clicked an image onto her computer screen. A provocative photo of Madonna in fishnets, black corset, and unmistakable eighties makeup, with dark eyebrows and fluffy blonde hair, mike in hand and her arm dangling limply at her side. Carl remembered it well, like it was yesterday. Only it wasn’t.

“That’s exactly how she looked, Lone Rasmussen told me. Dark eyeshadow and bloodred lips, the works. This is Rita Nielsen the day she disappeared. Older, perhaps, but still a bit of a stunner, apparently.”

“My goodness,” said Assad, master of the succinct.

“I checked out the contents of Rita’s glove compartment,” Rose continued. “All Madonna’s LPs on cassette. Including the sound track of
Who’s That Girl
, though the tape was missing. Most likely it was in the cassette player that got nicked. And then there were the brochures about Florence, and the guidebook of northern Italy. It got me wondering if it all might fit together. Have a look at this.”

She clicked an icon on the desktop and the same image of Madonna came up. Exactly the same, apart from a series of dates listed down one side of the page. Rose pointed at them.

“June the fourteenth and fifteenth, Nashinomiya Stadium, Osaka, Japan,” Assad read out loud. It couldn’t have sounded less Japanese. Absolutely abominable.

“The stadium’s actually called Nishinomiya, according to all my other sources, but who’s counting,” said Rose, a ring of superiority passing through black-painted lips. “But look at the bottom of the list and you’ll be in for a surprise.”

Carl heard Assad read out loud again. “September the sixth, Stadio Comunale, Florence, Italy.”

“OK,” said Carl. “Let me guess what year we’re talking about here: 1987, by any chance?”

Rose nodded vigorously. Now she was in high gear. “The same Sunday Rita Nielsen had crossed out in her calendar. If you ask me, she was going to the last concert on Madonna’s world tour. I’m positive. Rita wanted to get home from Copenhagen as quickly as possible so she could pack her things and get off to Florence to see her idol.”

Assad and Carl exchanged glances. The brochures, the pet-sitting, the Madonna obsession. It all matched up.

“Any way of checking if she booked a flight from Billund that day?”

Rose gave him a look of disappointment. “I’ve already done that, and their system doesn’t go back that far. They didn’t find anything in the flat either, so we’ll have to assume she had the tickets for the flight and the concert with her when she disappeared.”

“In which case it’s hardly likely to be suicide,” Carl concluded, and gave Rose a very gentle pat on the shoulder.

 • • • 

Carl read through Rose’s notes on Rita Nielsen. Checking Rita’s merits seemed to have been a relatively straightforward matter, for since childhood she had been under the watchful eye of vigilant public authorities. They’d all been involved at some point. Child welfare and the psychiatric services, the police, hospitals, and the prison system. Born 1 April 1935, to a prostitute mother who went on working the streets while Rita was brought up by family at the arse-end of the social scale. Caught shoplifting at five, minor crime throughout her six-year education. Approved school, children’s home, more crime. Prostituted herself for the first time at age fifteen, pregnant at seventeen, abortion, then a period under observation for social deviance and subnormal intelligence. The family had disintegrated long before.

After a time in foster care came more prostitution, followed by a spell at the Keller Mental Asylum in Brejning where she was diagnosed as subnormal. Repeated attempts to abscond and episodes of violence led to several terms at the Women’s Home on the island of Sprogø in the years 1955–61. There was another placement in a foster home and more crime, after which she disappeared from the system for a period extending from the summer of 1963 to the mid-1970s, when she seemed to have been earning a living as a dancer in various cities throughout Europe.

Next she set up a massage parlor in Aalborg, and was later convicted of procuring. After that, her social problems seemed to come to an end. Apparently she’d learned her lesson and managed to accumulate a considerable amount of money running a brothel and escort service without interference from the authorities. She paid her taxes and left liquid assets amounting to three and a half million kroner, the equivalent of at least ten million in today’s money.

Carl mused as he read. If Rita Nielsen had been mentally challenged, he knew quite a few others who were, too.

It was then that he leaned his elbow into something wet on his desk and realized his nose had been running. There was enough to fill a cup.

“Bollocks,” he exclaimed, throwing his head back and fumbling for something to use as a handkerchief.

Two minutes later he was out in the corridor, interrupting Rose and Assad as they fastened copies of Rita’s case documents to the smaller of their two expansive bulletin boards.

Carl glanced at the other board, a composite of soft particleboard panels extending from the door of Assad’s cubbyhole all the way to Rose’s office. On it was affixed one sheet of paper for each of the unsolved cases that had come in since Department Q had been set up. Arranged chronologically, several of them were joined by colored string to indicate a possible connection. The system was Assad’s, and it was simple. Blue string matched up cases Assad felt had something in common; red string joined those in which a connection had actually been established.

At the moment they had a couple of blues, but no reds.

There was no doubt this was a state of affairs Assad intended to do something about.

Carl ran his eyes over the cases. There were at least a hundred sheets of paper now. No doubt much of it was rubbish that didn’t belong. It was like finding a needle
and
a thread in a haystack, and then trying to thread the needle blindfolded.

“Right, I’m off home,” he said. “If I’m not mistaken, I’m coming down with the dreaded lurgy like you, Assad. If either of you are planning on hanging around for a while I’d suggest getting hold of the newspapers from the time Rita Nielsen disappeared. Try from the week leading up to the fourth of September and as far as the fifteenth. It’ll give us some idea of what was going on at the time. Buggered if I can remember.”

Rose planted her hands on her hips. “Like we’re just going to fall over something they overlooked in all that painstaking police work?”

She said “painstaking.” An odd word, Carl thought, for someone of such relative youth.

“Whatever,” he rejoined. “I’ve got some shut-eye and a goose to be thinking about.” And then he turned and was gone.

9

August 1987

Nete’s mother always told
her she had good hands. In her view there was no doubt whatsoever that Nete would one day be appreciated for the work they could do. Apart from having a good head on one’s shoulders, small, diligent hands were the most important tool God could give a person, and her father reaped the benefits of her gift after the death of his wife.

When fence posts collapsed it was Nete who put them up again. Nete caulked the feeding troughs when the wood began to rot. She nailed things together and broke them apart when the time came.

And these same able hands were to be her curse during her time on the island of Sprogø. Scratched until they bled when the scrub encroached upon the fields. Laboring all through the day with nothing in return. Nothing good, at least.

Then came better years when they were left in peace. But now they were to be put to use again.

 • • • 

She measured up the back room at the end of the hallway with the same tape measure she used in her sewing, precisely charting its height, width, and length. The window alcoves and the door were subtracted from the total surface area, and then she wrote up her order. Tools, paint, filler, silicone sealant, laths, nails, rolls of plastic sheeting, weather stripping, mineral wool, floorboards, and plasterboard enough for two layers.