Read The Purity of Vengeance Online
Authors: Jussi Adler-Olsen
“You what?” Carl exclaimed. It was all he could muster.
“We found it on the table after he’d gone.”
Carl felt like a new cub scout whose pack leader had sent him off on a fool’s errand to fetch sparks for the campfire.
“I’ll be right over,” he said, resolving on the spot to stop off in Vanløse on his way home and pay a certain freeloading cousin of his a social visit.
• • •
Ronny’s rented dwelling wasn’t exactly impressive. To call it a slum would have been a compliment. A rusty iron stairway led up the side of a building, whereafter the visitor arrived on a filthy concrete platform in front of a steel door that seemed to have been put in about halfway between the first and second floors. A bit like the access to a projector room in a disused cinema, only a shoddy prototype. He hammered a fist against the door a couple of times, hearing a voice shout from within, followed eventually by the rattle of the lock.
This time Ronny was dressed rather more homogeneously in his undies, briefs and wife-beater both embellished with the same roaring dragon.
“There’s a beer if you want one,” he said, leading Carl into an incense-filled room dimly lit by lava lamps and colored rice-paper lanterns bearing steamy erotic motifs.
“This is Mae, as I call her,” he said, nodding in the direction of an Asian woman small enough to fit inside Ronny’s carcass three or four times over.
The woman didn’t turn to greet him. She was busy at the stove, tiny hands fluttering over saucepans, the air filled with aromas of Pattaya and something that reminded Carl of his barbecue back home in Allerød.
“Little gem, she is. Won’t be long before the food’s ready,” Ronny said, sitting down on a bombed-out sofa camouflaged by saronglike pieces of cloth in various shades of saffron.
Carl sat down opposite him and accepted the bottle of lager Ronny placed on the ebony coffee table between them.
“You owe me six hundred and seventy kroner, as well as an explanation as to how you can possibly be eating again so soon after the meal you shoveled down your neck at the Tivoli Hall.”
Ronny smiled and patted his gut. “All a question of training,” he said, prompting the Thai woman to turn round with the whitest smile Carl had ever seen. She wasn’t the usual twenty-five-year-old with skin as smooth as a mirror, like most other imported Thai girls. This one was weathered, her face creased with laughter lines, eyes keen and bright.
One–nil to Ronny.
“You were picking up the tab, Carl, I told you so on the phone. You scheduled a meeting during working hours, so the rules say you pay.”
Carl took a deep breath. “Scheduled a meeting? Working hours? May I ask what you actually do for a living, Ronny? No, let me guess. Professional stretcher of undershirts, perhaps?”
He saw the Thai woman shudder with stifled laughter over by the stove. Not only did she understand Danish, she had a sense of humor, too.
“Cheers, Carl,” said Ronny, with a smile. “Good to see you again.”
“So I shouldn’t bank on getting my money back, then?”
“Nope. But I can offer you the most delicious Tom Kha Gai you could ever wish for.”
“Sounds like something poisonous.”
The Thai woman chuckled again.
“It’s a spicy chicken soup made with coconut milk, kaffir lime leaves, and galangal,” Ronny explained.
“Listen here, Ronny,” Carl sighed. “You did me for six hundred and seventy kroner today, but we’ll let that go. It’ll be the last time you pull one over on me. Right now I’m up to my eyeballs in work, but our little chat today has got me rather concerned. Are you lining up to blackmail me, Ronny? Because if you are, I can guarantee your feet won’t touch before you and little Mae here are in front of a judge in the district court or on a plane back to Chow Mein City or wherever the fuck it is you like to hang out, do you get my drift?”
The woman turned and began to berate Ronny in Thai. He shook his head a couple of times before his face suddenly became livid with rage. His bushy eyebrows seemed to take on a life of their own.
Then he glared at Carl. “I’ve got two things to say to you. First, you were the one who came to me this morning, like I said. And second, my wife, Mae-Ying-Thahan Mørck, just struck you off the guest list.”
• • •
Less than a minute later he was out the door. Apparently Ronny’s diminutive spouse had found out that if she rattled her kitchen utensils loud enough, people tended to beat a hasty retreat.
So our paths diverge again, Ronny, he said to himself, with a sneaking feeling that he might be wrong. He felt his mobile vibrate in his pocket and knew it was Mona before he saw the display.
“Hi, gorgeous,” he said, trying to sound like he had a cold, though not enough to prevent him from taking up an invitation.
“If you fancy giving it another try with my daughter and Ludwig, you can come round tomorrow,” she said.
A rather reluctant peace offering, by the sound of it.
“I’d love to,” he said, as if he meant it.
“Good. Seven o’clock, then, at mine. And I ought to remind you you’ve got an appointment with Kris tomorrow afternoon at three, in his office. You’ve been there before, so you know where it is.”
“Have I? Can’t say it rings a bell,” he said, lying through his teeth.
“Yes, you have. And Carl? You need it. I know the signals.”
“But I’ll be in Halsskov tomorrow.”
“Not at three o’clock, you won’t!”
“Mona, I’m doing fine. There isn’t the slightest bit of panic left in me after that nail-gun case, I can assure you.”
“I spoke to Marcus Jacobsen about your hysterics in the briefing room today.”
“Hysterics? What hysterics?”
“Besides, I’d like to be sure the man I’m on the verge of selecting to be my regular lover is mentally up to the job.”
Carl racked his brains to find the right rejoinder, only to sense all semblance of verbal dexterity slipping away. Expressing his feelings properly right now would mean resorting to tango steps, if he could.
“The way things are looking, you’re in for a rough time, I’m afraid. Marcus has asked me to tell you there’s been a development. They’ve turned something else up in the box that body was buried in.”
So much for ballroom dancing.
“They found a piece of paper underneath the body. A xerox of a photograph, wrapped up in plastic. It shows the victim, this Pete Boswell, standing between you and Anker with his arms around your shoulders.”
21
November 2010
“You’re looking tired, Carl.
Perhaps I should do the driving?” Assad said the next morning.
“I
am
tired, and no, you’re
not
doing the driving, Assad. Not as long as I’m with you, anyway.”
“Were you unable to sleep?”
Carl didn’t answer. He’d slept all right, albeit only for two hours. It had been a night of churning thoughts. The evening before, Marcus Jacobsen had e-mailed him the photo of the victim standing shoulder to shoulder with Carl and Anker, thereby confirming what Mona had told him earlier on.
“We’ve got the lab looking into it to see if they can ascertain whether or not it’s a fake. I’m assuming we agree that would be the best outcome,” the chief had written.
Understatement of the year. Of course it’d be best if they could conclude it was a fake, because it
was a fake
. Was Jacobsen angling for some kind of confession here?
He’d never been anywhere near the deceased, didn’t even know him, and yet this was costing him precious fucking sleep. If forensics was unable to prove the photo had been manipulated, Carl could expect a suspension any day now. He knew as well as anyone how Marcus operated.
He gazed out at the tailback of cars in front of them, working his jaw muscles. If he’d been thinking straight they’d have waited half an hour.
“A lot of traffic on the road,” said Assad, ever observant.
“Yeah, and if they don’t get their fucking arses moving, we won’t be in Halsskov before ten o’clock.”
“We have the whole day ahead of us, Carl.”
“No, we don’t. I’ve got to be back by three.”
“Ah, in that case we should put this away,” he said, pointing at the GPS. “We can leave the motorway and be there in no time if I read the map for you, Carl.”
It was a proposal that cost them another hour before they eventually turned into the driveway of Philip Nørvig’s house just as the eleven o’clock news started on the radio.
“Demonstrators are gathering this morning outside the home of Curt Wad in Brøndby,” said the newsreader. “A protest action initiated by grass-roots organizations seeks to highlight what they refer to as the antidemocratic principles on which Dr. Wad’s Purity Party is founded. Curt Wad stated . . .”
Carl switched off the engine and stepped out onto the gravel of the driveway.
• • •
“If it hadn’t been for Herbert . . .”
Mie Nørvig nodded in the direction of the man who had just entered the living room to introduce himself. Like Mie, he seemed to be somewhere in his seventies.
“. . . well, Cecilie and I would never have been able to keep the house on at all.”
Carl greeted the man politely as he sat down.
“I can well understand. It must have been a trying time indeed,” Carl said with a nod. Another understatement. Not only had her husband gone bust, he’d done a bunk on her and left her to sort out the mess herself.
“I’ll be very direct, Mrs. Nørvig.” He hesitated, suddenly in doubt. “That
is
still your surname, isn’t it?”
She rubbed the back of her hand nervously. The question was obviously an embarrassment. “Yes, it is. You see, Herbert and I aren’t married. The courts declared me bankrupt when Philip disappeared, so it wasn’t the sensible thing to do.”
Carl forced a smile to show he understood, though he couldn’t have cared less whether they were married or not. “Is it conceivable your husband just couldn’t cope, and decided to put it all behind him?”
“Not if you mean did he commit suicide. Philip was too much of a coward for that.” It sounded harsh, but maybe she would have preferred him to have taken a length of rope and hanged himself in one of the trees in the garden. Maybe it would have been better for her.
“No, what I mean is whether he might simply have run away from it all. Perhaps he managed to put some money aside and then settled down somewhere abroad where no one would find him.”
She looked at him with surprise. Had the thought never occurred to her?
“Impossible. Philip hated traveling. Sometimes I used to pester him for us to go on a trip. Nothing special, just a bus trip to Germany, that sort of thing. A couple of days at most. But he never would. He hated going anywhere new. Why else would he set up his practice in a dump like this? Because it’s where he grew up, that’s why!”
“Perhaps he felt he had no option but to disappear, the way things stood with the business. A mountain village in Crete, maybe, or somewhere in Argentina. A place where a person running away from problems at home could settle down nicely with no questions asked.”
Mie Nørvig snorted and shook her head. The idea was clearly unthinkable.
The man she called Herbert broke in.
“I’m sorry, but perhaps I ought to add at this point that Philip was an old schoolfriend of my elder brother. He always used to say Philip was a sissy.” He sent his partner a knowing look, most likely to reinforce his position as a considerably more appropriate match than his predecessor. “Once, when there was a school trip to Bornholm, Philip refused to go. He said he wouldn’t be able to understand a word of the local dialect, so there was no point. His teachers huffed and puffed, but he stuck to his guns. He wasn’t one to be forced into doing what didn’t suit him.”
“Hmm. Doesn’t sound like what I’d call a sissy, but maybe you’re made of hardier stuff here. OK, let’s put that theory aside for the time being. It wasn’t suicide, and he didn’t settle abroad. Which means we’re left with an accident, manslaughter, or murder. Which do you reckon would be most likely?”
“In my opinion it was that damned organization he belonged to that killed him,” Mie Nørvig said, looking at Assad.
Carl glanced at his assistant, whose dark eyebrows had suddenly relocated to the northern extremity of his corrugated brow.
“Come now, Mie,” said Herbert, from the sofa. “We don’t know that.”
Carl fixed his gaze on the elderly woman. “I’m not sure I’m with you. What organization?” he asked. “There’s no mention in the case file of him belonging to any organization.”
“I never mentioned it before.”
“I see. Then perhaps you might put us in the picture?”
“They called themselves The Cause.”
Assad reached for his notepad.
“The Cause? A bit melodramatic, isn’t it? Sounds like a Sherlock Holmes whodunnit.” He ventured a smile, but the information had triggered quite a different reaction inside him. “And what might this ‘Cause’ involve?” he asked.
“Mie, I don’t think you ought to . . .” interrupted Herbert, but Mie Nørvig ignored him.
“I don’t know much about it, to be honest, because Philip never mentioned it. Apparently he wasn’t allowed. But I couldn’t help but pick up little snippets through the years. I was his secretary, after all,” she said, dismissing her partner’s protest with a wave of her hand.
“What sort of snippets?” Carl went on.
“About some people deserving to have children and others not. Philip sometimes assisted in passing compulsory sterilizations through the system. He’d been doing it for some years before I began working for him. There was an old case they sometimes mentioned when Curt was here. I—”
“Curt?” Carl interrupted.
“Curt Wad. He’s in politics now.”
Carl tried to place the vaguely familiar name and failed.
“The Hermansen case, they called it,” the woman continued. “I think it must have been the first one they collaborated on. In later years Philip also served as a contact for doctors and other lawyers. There was a whole network he was in charge of.”
“I see. But that sort of thing wasn’t unusual at the time, was it? I mean, why should your husband have been in danger on that account? The authorities must have allowed the sterilization of lots of mentally challenged individuals in the old days.”