and mother had spent a night together that made them cast dreamy glances at each other from the moment they loaded the car with packages until the moment it all ended. Christmas Eve morning — what an oddly linked and joyous chain of words that was. So filled with promise. Uffe had talked about getting a compact disc player; it was the last time in his life that he expressed any specific sort of wish.
Then they took off. They were happy, and she and Uffe were laughing. Everyone was expecting them at their destination.
Uffe had given her a shove in the backseat. He was more than forty pounds lighter than his sister, but as pushy as a wild little puppy, diving in among the rest of the litter to suckle. Merete shoved him back, taking off her Peruvian cap to use it to bat him on the head. It was then that things got out of hand.
As the car went around a curve in the woods, Uffe hit her again, and Merete grabbed hold of her brother to force him back onto the seat. He kicked and howled and shrieked with laughter, and Merete pushed him down harder. At that instant, as her father chuckled and reached back his hand to give them both a swat, Merete and Uffe looked up. Their car was in the middle of overtaking another vehicle. The red Ford Sierra right next to them had a gray spattering of salt on its side doors. A man and woman in their forties were sitting in front, staring straight ahead. On the backseat sat a boy and a girl, just like them, and Uffe and Merete smiled at the pair. The boy looked like he was a couple of years younger than Merete; his hair was cut short. He caught her gleeful glance as she knocked her father’s arm aside and she laughed back at him, not noticing her father had lost control of the car until the boy’s expression suddenly changed in the light flickering through the spruce trees. For a second the boy’s terrified blue eyes were riveted on hers, and then he was gone.
The sound of metal grinding against metal coincided with the shattering of the side windows on the other vehicle. The children sitting on the backseat fell over just as Uffe toppled against Merete. Behind her, glass was breaking, and in front of her the windshield was covered by dark shapes bumping against each other. She couldn’t tell whether it was their car or the other vehicle that made the trees along the edge of the road come toppling down, but by then Uffe’s body had twisted around and he was about to be strangled by the seat belt. Then came a deafening crash, first from the other car, then from theirs. The blood on the upholstery and front windshield was mixed with dirt and snow from the forest floor, and a tree branch pierced the calf of Merete’s leg. A broken tree trunk rammed the bottom of the vehicle and tossed them up in the air for a moment. The crash when they landed with the nose of the car on the road merged with the screeching sound of the Ford Sierra knocking over a tree. Then their car flipped over with a jolt and slid along on its side, into the thickets. Uffe’s arms were sticking up in the air, and his legs were pressed against the back of their mother’s seat, which had been wrenched from the floor. At no time did Merete see her mother or father. She saw only Uffe.
She woke with her heart pounding so hard in her chest that it hurt. She was ice-cold and clammy with sweat.
“Stop it, Merete,” she told herself out loud, taking as deep a breath as she could manage. She put her hand to her chest, as if physically trying to wipe away the memory. Only in her dreams did she see all the details with such terrifying clarity. At the time, she hadn’t been able to take them all in — she’d comprehended only the general situation. The flashes of light, screams, blood, and darkness, followed by more light.
She took another deep breath and looked down. Lying in the bed beside her was Uffe, breathing with a slight whistling sound. His face was calm. Outside, the rain was quietly trickling through the roof gutters.
She reached out her hand and cautiously stroked her brother’s hair as she pressed her lips tight to hold back the sobs trying to force their way out.
Thank God it was ages since she’d last had that dream.
10. 2007
“Hello, my name is Assad,” he said. The hairy mitt that he held out toward Carl looked as if it had tried a bit of everything.
Carl didn’t immediately realize where he was or who was talking to him. It hadn’t exactly been a scintillating morning. As a matter of fact, he’d actually fallen sound asleep with his feet propped up on the desk, the Sudoku magazine on his lap, and his chin tucked halfway down in the opening of his shirt. The usually sharp creases on his shirt now resembled an ECG. His legs were half asleep as he took them down from the desk and stared at the short, dark man standing in front of him. There was no question that he was older than Carl, or that he hadn’t been recruited from the same peasant kingdom that Carl called home.
“ Assad. OK,” replied Carl sluggishly. But what the hell did this have to do with him?
“You are Carl Morck, as it says outside on the door. I must want to help you, they say. Please, is that correct?”
Carl squinted a bit, weighing all the possible interpretations of what the man had just said. Help him?
“Yeah, I sure as hell hope so” was Carl’s reply.
* * *
He’d brought this all on himself, and now he was a victim of his own poorly thought-out demands. Unfortunately, he hadn’t realized until now that having someone else in the office across the hall would create obligations. On the one hand, the man had to be kept busy; on the other hand, Carl also had to occupy himself, at least to a reasonable degree. No, he hadn’t thought things through. He would no longer be able to drift through the day, now that he had that man staring at him. He’d thought it would make life easier, having an assistant. The man would have plenty to do while Carl kept busy counting off the hours behind his closed eyelids. The floor had to be washed, coffee had to be made, and documents needed to be added to the case files, which then had to be put away. There would be more than enough tasks to occupy him, he’d thought at first. But now, a little more than two hours later, the man was sitting there, staring at him with big eyes, and everything was nice and neat and tidy. Even the bookshelf behind Carl had been filled with reference books, arranged alphabetically, and the spines of all the ring binders had been numbered and were ready for use. In two and a half hours the man had completed all the work, and that was that.
As far as Carl was concerned, he might as well go home now.
“Do you have a driver’s license?” he asked Assad, hoping that Marcus Jacobsen had forgotten to take that detail into account. If so, the whole question of the man’s employment could be taken up for discussion again.
“I drive a taxi and a car and a truck and a T-55 tank and also a T-62 and armored cars and the motorcycles with and without sidecars.”
That was when Carl suggested that for the next couple of hours Assad should sit quietly in his chair and read some of the books on the shelf behind him. He turned around and grabbed the nearest volume, which he handed to his assistant.
“I have read all the newspapers and also the constitutions and everything else.”
“Everything else?” said Carl. This wasn’t going to be easy. “Do you like solving Sudoku puzzles too?” he asked, handing Assad the magazine.
By the afternoon his back was aching from sitting up straight. Assad’s coffee was an alarmingly potent experience, and Carl’s sleep deprivation had now been given a jolt of caffeine. He had the annoying sensation of blood racing through his veins. That was why he had started leafing through the folders. A couple of the cases he already knew inside and out, but most of them were from other police districts, and a couple were from before he joined the criminal investigation department. What all of them had in common was that they’d required a massive number of man-hours and had sparked enormous attention in the media. Several of the cases had involved citizens who were well-known public figures. But all of the cases had been stranded at the stage where the leads had
