“Many things have turned up that point to an accident,” Carl continued, “so you’d have to be a bit of a conspiracy nerd to think otherwise. At the same time, we in Department Q are a bunch of skeptical devils, and that’s probably why we were given this assignment.” Everyone smiled a bit. At least they were listening. “So I’m going to ask all of you a number of questions, and don’t hesitate to speak up if you have anything to say.”
Most of them nodded again.
“Do any of you remember whether Merete had a meeting with a group lobbying for placenta research shortly before she disappeared?”
“Yes, I do,” said someone from the party office. “It was a delegation put together for the occasion by Bille Antvorskov from BasicGen.”
“Bille Antvorskov? You mean
“Yes, that’s right. He put together the group and arranged a meeting with Merete. They were making the rounds.”
“Making the rounds? With Merete Lynggaard?”
“No.” The woman smiled. “That’s what we call it when a special-interest lobby meets with all the parties, one after the other. The group was trying to put together a majority of votes in the Folketing.”
“Would there be a record of the meeting anywhere?”
“Yes, there should be. I don’t know whether it was printed out, but we might be able to find it on the computer belonging to Merete’s secretary.”
“Does that computer still exist?” asked Carl. He could hardly believe what he was hearing.
The woman from the party office smiled. “We always save the hard drives when we change operating systems. When we switched to Windows XP, at least ten hard drives had to be replaced.”
“Aren’t all of you on a network?”
“Yes, we are, but back then Merete’s secretary and a few others weren’t hooked up to it.”
“Paranoid, perhaps?” He smiled at the woman.
“Maybe.”
“Would you be willing to try to find the minutes of that meeting for me?”
She nodded again.
He turned to the rest of the group. “One of the participants at that meeting was a man named Daniel Hale. From what I’ve heard, he and Merete were interested in each other. Is there anyone here who can confirm or expand on this?”
Several people exchanged glances. Apparently he’d hit home again. Now it was just a matter of who wanted to answer.
“I don’t know his name, but I saw her talking to a man down in Snapstinget, the MPs’ restaurant.” It was the party spokesperson who decided to take the floor. She was an irritating but tough young lady who looked good on TV and would obviously hold major ministry posts in the future, when the right time came. “She looked very pleased to see him, and she seemed rather distracted while she was talking with the chairpersons from the Socialist’s and Radical Center’s health committees.” She smiled. “I think plenty of people noticed.”
“Because Merete didn’t usually act that way? Is that what you mean?”
“I think it was the first time anyone here had ever seen Merete’s attention waver. Yes, it was highly unusual.”
“Could he have been this Daniel Hale that I mentioned?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there anyone else who knows about this?”
They all shook their heads.
“How would you describe the man?” was Carl’s next question for the party spokesperson.
“He was slightly hidden by the pillar he was sitting behind, but he was slim and well dressed and suntanned, as far as I remember.”
“How old was he?”
She shrugged. “A little older than Merete, I think.”
Slim, well dressed, a little older than Merete. If she hadn’t said that he was suntanned, the description would have applied to all the men in the room, including himself, if one didn’t mind adding five or ten years at the wrong end.
“I imagine there must have been a lot of documents from Merete’s time that couldn’t simply be dumped on her successor.” He nodded at Birger Larsen. “I’m thinking about appointment diaries, notebooks, handwritten notes, and things like that. Were those sorts of things just thrown out or shredded? No one could really know whether she would be coming back, could they?”
Again it was the woman from the party office who responded. “The police took some of it, and some of it was discarded. I don’t think much was left.”
“What about her appointment diary? Where did that end up?”
She shrugged. “Not here, anyway.”
Marianne Koch broke in. “Merete always took her diary home with her.” Her tone of voice did not invite contradiction. “Always,” she emphasized.
“What did it look like?”
“It was a very ordinary time system calendar, in a worn, reddish-brown leather cover. A daily planner, appointment book, notebook and phone list all in one.”
“And it hasn’t turned up,” Carl added. “That much I know. So we have to assume that it disappeared into the sea with her.”
“I don’t believe that,” the secretary replied at once.
“Why not?”
“Because Merete always carried a small purse, and the diary simply wouldn’t fit inside. She almost always put it in her briefcase, instead, and I can guarantee that she wouldn’t take her briefcase along to stand on the sun deck of a ship. She was on holiday, after all, so why would she take it with her? It wasn’t in her car, either, was it?”
Carl shook his head. Not as far as he could recall.
Carl had been waiting a long time for the crisis counselor with the lovely ass, and now he was starting to feel uneasy. If she’d arrived on time, he would have let his natural charm guide him forward, but now, after having repeated his lines in his mind and practiced his smiles for more than twenty minutes, he was feeling deflated.
She didn’t look particularly guilt-stricken when she finally made her arrival on the third floor, but she did apologize. It was the sort of self-confidence that drove Carl wild. It was also what he’d fallen for when he first met Vigga. That and her infectious laugh.
Mona Ibsen sat down across from him. The light from outside on Otto Monsteds Gade shone on the back of her neck, creating a halo around her head. The soft light revealed delicate lines on her face; her lips were sensual and a deep red. Everything about her signaled high class. Carl locked eyes with her so as not to dwell on her voluptuous breasts. Nothing in the world could make him want to break out of the state he was in.
She asked him about the case out in Amager. Wanted to know about the specific timeline, actions, and consequences. She asked him about everything that was of no significance, and Carl laid it on thick. A little more blood than in reality. Shots that were a little more powerful, sighs a little deeper. And she stared at him intently, making note of the key points in his story. When he got to the moment when he had to talk about the impression it had made on him to see his dead and wounded friends and how badly he’d been sleeping ever since, she pushed her chair back from the table, placed her business card in front of him, and began to pack up her things.
“What’s going on?” he asked as her notebook disappeared into her leather briefcase.
“It seems to me that you should be asking yourself that question. When you’re ready to tell the truth, make another appointment to see me.”
He gave her a frown. “What does that mean? Everything I just told you is exactly how it happened.”
She pulled the briefcase close to the slight curve of her stomach under the tight skirt. “First of all, I can tell by looking at you that you have no trouble sleeping. Second, you’ve really been exaggerating the details of your whole account. Or did you think I hadn’t read the report in advance?” He was about to protest when she held up her hand. “Third, I can see it in your eyes when you mention Hardy Henningsen and Anker Hoyer. I don’t know why, but
