The Purity of Vengeance (3 page)

Carl sighed. The name of the drowned man was Birger Mørck, Carl’s uncle. A jovial and generous man whom both his son, Ronny, and Carl himself had looked up to and often accompanied on excursions. Just as they had done that very day, to glean whatever they might about the mysteries of angling.

But a couple of girls from Copenhagen had cycled the length and breadth of the country and were now approaching their destination in Skagen, their flimsy tops arousingly moist with perspiration.

The sight of these two blonde beauties as they came toiling over the rises impacted on Carl and his cousin, Ronny, like a blow from a hammer, prompting them to put down their fishing rods and leg it across the field like a pair of young bulls setting their hooves on grass for the first time in their lives.

When they returned to the river two hours later with the contours of the two girls’ tight tops forever imprinted on their retinas, Birger Mørck was already dead.

Many hours of questioning and many suspicions later, the Hjørring police shelved the case for good. And although they never succeeded in tracing the two girls from the capital who were the young men’s only alibi, Ronny and Carl were released without charge. Carl’s father was enraged and inconsolable for months, but apart from that the matter had no further consequences.

“You were quite a looker in those days, Carl. How old were you?” Rose intervened from the doorway.

He dropped the folder onto the desk. It wasn’t a time he cared to be reminded about.

“Seventeen, and Ronny was twenty-seven.” He sighed. “Have you any idea why this should turn up here all of a sudden?”

“What do you mean,
why
?” She rapped bony knuckles against her skull: “Hello, Prince Charming, anyone home? How about waking up a bit? That’s what we do here, isn’t it? We investigate unsolved crimes!”

“Yeah, but this one was closed as an accident. And apart from that, it didn’t just emerge from out of your chair, did it?”

“You mean I should ask the police in Hjørring how come it’s landed here?”

Carl raised his eyebrows. Ask a stupid question . . .

She turned on her heel and clattered off toward her own domain. Message understood.

Carl stared into space. Why the hell did this of all cases have to turn up now? As if it hadn’t caused trouble enough already.

He looked once again at the photo of Ronny and himself, then shoved the folder over toward the other cases that lay piled up on his desk. Past was past but this was now. Nothing could alter that. Five minutes ago he’d read Mona’s note. She’d called him “darling.” He needed to keep his priorities straight.

He smiled, delved into his pocket for his mobile, and stared despondently at the minuscule keys. If he sent Mona a text message it would take him ten minutes to write it, and if he called her he could wait just as long before she answered.

He sighed and began to text. The technology of mobile keypads was seemingly the work of Pygmies with macaroni for fingers, and the average northern European male who needed to operate such a contraption could only feel like a hippopotamus trying to play the flute.

When he was finished he studied the result of his efforts and allowed a string of wrong spellings to pass with a sigh. Mona would understand well enough: the Martinmas goose had a taker.

Just as he put the mobile down on his desk, a head popped round the door.

The comb-over had been given a trim since he’d seen it last, and the leather jacket looked like it had been pressed, but the man inside it was as crumpled as ever.

“Bak. What the fuck are you doing here?” he inquired mechanically.

“As if you don’t know already,” his visitor replied, lack of sleep advertised by his drooping eyelids. “I’m going out of my mind. That’s why!”

He plonked himself down on the chair opposite, despite Carl’s obvious disapproval. “My sister Esther’s never going to be the same again. And the bastard who threw acid in her face is sitting in a basement shop on Eskildsgade, laughing his head off. I’m sure you can understand why an old copper like me isn’t exactly proud of his sister running a brothel, but do you think the scum should get away with doing what he’s done?”

“I’ve no idea why you’re here, Bak. Have a word with City, or Marcus Jacobsen, or one of the other chiefs if you’re not happy with the way the investigation’s proceeding. Assault and vice aren’t my field, you know that.”

“I’m here to ask you and Assad to come with me and force a confession out of the fucker.”

Carl felt his brow furrow all the way up to his hairline. Was the man out of his mind?

“You’ve just had a new case turn up. I’m sure you’ve noticed,” Bak went on. “It’s from me. Old mate of mine up in Hjørring passed it on to me a few months back. I left it in Rose’s office last night.”

Carl scrutinized the man as he considered his options. As far as he could make out, there were three.

He could get up and punch him in the mouth. That was one. Another would be to kick his arse all the way down the corridor. But Carl chose the third.

“Yeah, that’s it, there,” he said, pointing toward the nightmarish pile on the corner of his desk. “How come you didn’t deliver it to me? It would have been less devious, I’d have thought. More honest.”

Bak smiled briefly. “When did honesty ever lead to anything with us two? Nah, I just wanted to make sure someone other than you down here laid eyes on it, so it wouldn’t mysteriously disappear. Know what I mean?”

The two other options became attractive again. A good thing this dick was no longer around on a daily basis.

“I’ve been saving that folder until the right moment came along,” Bak continued. “Do you get my drift?”

“No, I fucking don’t. What moment?”

“The moment when I need your help!”

“Don’t think I’m going to cave some potential perp’s skull in just because you’re waving a thirty-year-old drowning in front of my nose. I’m not interested, and I’ll tell you why.”

Carl extended a finger into the air for each point he made.

“
One
: The case is time-barred.
Two
: It was an accident. My uncle drowned. He took a turn and fell in the river, exactly as the investigators concluded.
Three
: I wasn’t there when it happened and neither was my cousin.
Four
: Unlike you, I’m a decent copper who doesn’t go around beating up his suspects.”

Carl paused for a moment, the last utterance lingering in his throat. As far as he knew, Bak couldn’t possibly have anything on him of that kind. His expression certainly didn’t indicate it to be the case.

“And
five
.” He extended all five fingers, then clenched his fist. “If I ever
do
get nasty with anyone, it’ll most likely be with a certain ex-cop who doesn’t seem to get the fact that he’s no longer on the force.”

Bak’s expression hardened at once. “OK. But let me tell you this. Former colleague of mine from Hjørring likes to go to Thailand. Two weeks in Bangkok with all the frills.”

“So?” said Carl, wondering what that had to do with anything.

“It seems your cousin, Ronny, has similar tastes. Likes a drink as well, he does,” Bak went on. “And you know what, Carl? When your cousin, Ronny, gets tanked up, he starts talking.”

Carl suppressed a deep sigh. Ronny, that bloody idiot! Was he getting himself into trouble again? It had been ten years at least since they’d seen each other at a fateful confirmation party in Odder, on which occasion Ronny had claimed more than his fair share of not only the booze but also the girls who’d been helping out as waitresses. Which would have been OK if only one of them hadn’t been rather too willing, underage, and sister to the confirmand. The scandal had been contained, though remained an indelible blight on the Odder branch of the family. No, Ronny wasn’t exactly the retiring sort.

Carl waved his hand dismissively. What did he care about Ronny?

“Go upstairs to Marcus and sound off as much as you like, Bak, but you know him as well as I do. You’ll get exactly the same thing out of him as you’re getting out of me. We don’t beat up suspects, and we don’t give in to threats from former colleagues with old history like this.”

Bak leaned back in the chair. “In this bar in Thailand, in the presence of witnesses, your cousin was boasting to anyone who cared to listen that he killed his dad.”

Carl’s eyes narrowed. It didn’t sound plausible.

“Oh, he was, was he? So report him and his rat-arsed confession, if you want. I know for a fact he couldn’t have drowned his dad. He was with me.”

“He says you were both in on it. Nice relative you’ve got there.”

The frown that had appeared on Carl’s brow plunged at once to the bridge of his nose as he rose to his feet, summoning all his poorly distributed body weight into his chest region. “Assad! Get in here, will you?” he bellowed at maximum velocity into Bak’s astonished face.

Ten seconds later, Carl’s feverish assistant stood sniffling in the doorway.

“Assad, my dear, flu-ridden friend. Would you be so kind as to cough all over this idiot here? Go on, take a deep breath.”

 • • • 

“What else have you got in that pile of yours, Rose?”

For a second she looked like she was considering dumping the lot into his lap, but for once Carl had read her correctly: something had already grabbed her attention.

“That business about the madam who got attacked last night made me think of a case we just got in from Kolding. It was in the stack I picked up over at NIC.”

“Did you know the woman is Bak’s sister?”

Rose nodded. “Don’t really know him myself, but word gets round, doesn’t it? Wasn’t it him who was here just now?” She jabbed a finger at the case folder at the top of the file, then opened it with a flutter of black-painted nails. “Now listen up, Carl, otherwise you can read it yourself.”

“OK, OK,” said Carl, his gaze skating about her uncluttered gray-white office. He almost felt a twinge of sadness as his mind went back to her alter ego Yrsa’s inferno of pink.

“This case here’s about a woman called Rita Nielsen, ‘stage name’”—Rose drew quotes in the air—“Louise Ciccone. That’s what she was calling herself for a time in the eighties when she organized so-called”—more quotes—“‘exotic dancing’ at nightclubs in the Triangle region of southeast Jutland. Several convictions for fraud, later for procuring prostitutes and running a brothel. Owned an escort service in Kolding up through the seventies and eighties, after which she disappeared into thin air in Copenhagen in 1987. Mobile Unit concentrated its investigation on the porn scenes in mid-Jutland and Copenhagen, but after three months they shelved the case with the suggestion it was most likely a suicide. A lot of serious crimes had come up in the meantime, so they no longer had the manpower to carry on the investigation, so it says.”

She laid the folder on the desk and put on a sour expression. “Shelved, just like the Esther Bak case last night will be, most probably. Have
you
seen anyone rushing around in a frenzy upstairs so they can nail the bastard who did that to the poor woman?”

Carl gave a shrug. The only frenzy he’d seen that morning had been the one that had appeared in his stepson Jesper’s sullen face when he woke him up at seven o’clock and told him he’d have to make his own way to college in Gentofte.

“The way I see it, there’s absolutely zero to indicate suicidal tendencies in this case,” Rose continued. “Rita Nielsen gets into her flash white Mercedes 500SEC and leaves home just like any other day! A couple of hours later she’s disappeared off the face of the earth, and that’s that.” She pulled out a photo and tossed it onto the desk in front of him. It showed the car parked at a curbside, its interior stripped.

What a motor. Room for half the tarts of Vesterbro to sprawl and wriggle on its hood in the fake furs they’d scrimped and saved for. A far cry from his hand-me-down service vehicle.

“The last anyone saw of her was on Friday the fourth of September 1987. Looking at her credit-card transactions we can follow her movements from the time she leaves her home address in Kolding at five in the morning. She drives across Fyn, where she fills up with petrol, takes the ferry over the Storebælt, and then carries on to Copenhagen, where she buys a pack of cigarettes in a kiosk on Nørrebrogade at ten past ten. No one sees her after that. The Mercedes turns up stripped a couple of days later on Kapelvej. Leather seats, spare wheel, radio-cassette, the lot. They even half-inched the steering wheel. All that was left basically was a couple of cassette tapes and some books in the glove compartment.”

Carl scratched his chin. “There can’t have been many shops with direct-debit terminals back then, certainly not a kiosk in Nørrebro. Why go to all the bother of paying by card? Most likely it’ll have been a paper transaction, and all for a lousy pack of smokes. Who’d have the bloody patience?”

Rose shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t like cash. Maybe she didn’t like the feel of it. Maybe she liked having her money in the bank and letting others pay the interest. Maybe she only had a five-hundred-kroner note and the kiosk didn’t have change. Maybe—”

“Yes, all right, Rose, that’ll do.” Carl held up his hands. “Just tell me one thing. How come they reckoned it was suicide? Was she seriously ill? Or perhaps she
was
in financial difficulties? Was that why she paid for her ciggies by card?”

Somewhere inside her drastically oversized gray sweater, which looked suspiciously like it had been knitted by Yrsa, Rose shrugged again. “Who knows? It’s all a bit odd, if you ask me. Rita Nielsen, alias Louise Ciccone, was quite a prosperous lady, and if her dodgy CV’s anything to go by she certainly wasn’t one to be knocked off her perch. According to her ‘girls’ in Kolding she was hard as nails, a survivor. She’d rather wipe out the entire world than risk going down herself, one of them said.”

“Hmm!” The feeling had planted itself firmly in Carl’s psyche. It annoyed him, but his interest had been awakened. The questions were beginning to pop up, one after another. Like those cigarettes. Would a person buy cigarettes right before committing suicide? Well, maybe, to calm the nerves.