The Keeper of Lost Causes

management course yet. The deadline is coming up soon, you know.”

“I guess I’ll just have to wait until next time, won’t I?”

“You know we have a plan here, don’t you, Carl? When your department starts showing results, it would be only natural that you got help from your former colleagues. But it won’t do any good if you don’t have the authority that the title of police superintendent would give you. You don’t really have a choice, Carl. You have to take that course.”

“It won’t make me a better investigator, sitting in a classroom sharpening pencils.”

“You’re the head of a new department here, and the title goes along with the baggage. You’re taking the course — or you’ll have to find somewhere else to do your investigating.”

Carl stared out of the window at the Golden Tower in Tivoli Gardens, which a couple of workmen were making ready for the new season. Four or five times up and down on that monstrous ride and Marcus Jacobsen would be begging him mercy.

“I’ll take that into consideration, Mr. Superintendent.”

The mood was a bit chilly when Borge Bak came in with his black leather jacket draped neatly over his shoulders.

Carl didn’t wait for the homicide chief to initiate the conversation. “So, Bak! That was a hell of a job you lot did on the Lynggaard case. You were up to your necks in signs that everything wasn’t as it should be. Had the whole team caught sleeping sickness, or what?”

Bak’s eyes were like steel, but Carl was damned if he was going to look away.

“So now I want to know if there’s anything else in the case that you’re keeping to yourself,” Carl went on. “Was there someone or something that put the brakes on your excellent investigation, Borge?”

At this point the homicide chief was clearly considering putting on his reading glasses so he could hide behind them, but the scowl on Bak’s face demanded some sort of intervention.

“If we just ignore the last couple of remarks that Carl delivered in his inimitable style”—Marcus raised his eyebrows as he glanced at Carl for a moment—“then it’s easy to understand his point of view, since he’s just discovered that the deceased Daniel Hale was not the man that Merete Lynggaard met at Christiansborg. Which is something that should have been uncovered during the previous investigation. We have to give him that.”

Bak’s hunched shoulders produced a couple of folds in his leather jacket, the only sign of how tense this information was making him feel.

Carl went for the jugular. “That’s not all, Borge. Did you happen to know, for example, that Daniel Hale was gay? Or that he was out of the country during the period when he presumably was in contact with Merete Lynggaard? You should have taken the trouble to show Hale’s photo to Merete’s secretary, Sos Norup, or to the head of the delegation, Bille Antvorskov. Then you would have known at once that something wasn’t right.”

Bak slowly sat down. Thoughts were clearly swirling around in his head. Of course he’d been involved in tons of cases since then, and the workload in the department had always been onerous, but damned if Bak wasn’t feeling an urge to squirm.

“Do you think we can still rule out the possibility that some sort of crime was committed?” Carl turned to look at his boss. “What do you think, Marcus?”

“We assume that you’re going to investigate the circumstances surrounding Daniel Hale’s death. Am I right, Carl?”

“We’re already working on that.” Again he turned to Bak. “I’ve got a former colleague up in Hornb?k in the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries who’s really on the ball and knows how to think.” He tossed the photos on the desk in front of Marcus. “If it hadn’t been for Hardy, I wouldn’t have come in contact with a photographer by the name of Jonas Hess and acquired a couple of photos. They prove that Merete Lynggaard brought her briefcase home with her from Christiansborg on her last day there; they catch her lesbian secretary showing a great interest in her boss; there are ones of Merete having a conversation with someone on the stairs of Christiansborg a few days before she disappeared. A meeting that apparently upset her.” He pointed to the photo of her face and the uneasy look in her eyes. “It’s true that we only have a picture of the guy from the back, but if you compare his hair and posture and height, he actually looks a lot like Daniel Hale, even though that’s not who he is.” Carl then placed one of the photos of Hale from the InterLab brochure next to the others.

“Now I ask you, Borge Bak: Don’t you think it’s rather odd for her briefcase to disappear somewhere between Christiansborg and Stevns? Because you never did find it, did you? And don’t you think it’s also odd that Daniel Hale should die the day after Merete’s disappearance?”

Bak shrugged. Of course he thought so; the idiot just didn’t want to admit it.

“Briefcases go missing,” he said. “She could have left it at a gas station or somewhere else on her way home. We searched her house and her car, which was still on the ferry. We did what we could.”

“Oh, right. OK, you say she might have forgotten it at a gas station, but are you sure about that? As far as I can tell from her bank statement, she didn’t take care of any errands on her way home that day. You didn’t do your homework very well, did you, Bak?”

By now Bak looked ready to explode. “I’m telling you that we put a lot of effort into searching for that briefcase.”

“I think both Bak and I realize that there’s more work for us to do here,” the boss tried to mediate.

More work for “us,” he’d said. Was everybody suddenly going to start meddling in the case?

Carl looked away from his boss. No, of course Marcus Jacobsen didn’t mean anything by it. Because no help was ever going to be forthcoming from upstairs. Carl knew all too well how things were run in this place.

“I’m going to ask you again, Bak. Do you think we’ve covered everything now? You didn’t include Hale in your report, and there was nothing about Karen Mortensen’s observations regarding Uffe Lynggaard. Is there anything else missing, Borge? Can you tell me that? I could use some support right now. Do you get it?”

Bak stared down at the floor as he rubbed his nose. In a second he’d raise his other hand to stroke his comb-over. He could have jumped up and made a hell of a ruckus, considering all the insinuations and accusations being leveled at him. That would have been perfectly understandable, but when it came right down to it, Bak was a detective with a capital D. And right now his mind was far away.

Jacobsen gave Carl a look that said “take it easy,” and so Carl kept his mouth shut. He agreed with Marcus. Bak should be given a little time to think.

They sat like that for a whole minute before Bak raised his hand to touch his comb-over. “The skid marks,” he said. “The skid marks from the Daniel Hale accident, I mean.”

“What about them?”

Bak looked up. “As it says in the report, there were none on the road from either of the vehicles. I mean not even a shadow of a mark. It seemed as if Hale wasn’t paying attention and simply veered over the line into the other lane. Then: Kapowwww!” He clapped his hands together. “No one managed to react before the collision occurred. That was the assumption.”

“Yeah, that’s what it says in the police report. Why are you mentioning this now?”

“I was driving past the accident site a few weeks later and remembered where it happened, so I stopped to take a look.”

“And?”

“As the report said, there were no skid marks, but it was easy to see where the accident occurred. They hadn’t yet removed the shattered, scorched tree or repaired the wall, and tracks from the other vehicle were still visible in the field.”

“But? You’re leading up to something here, right?”

Bak nodded. “But then I discovered that there actually were some marks seventy-five feet farther along the road toward Tastrup. They were already rather blurry, but I could see they were quite short, only about a foot and a half long. And I thought to myself: What if these marks were from the same accident?”

Carl was having trouble following Bak and was annoyed when his boss beat him to it. “So they were marks left by someone trying to avoid a collision?” Marcus asked.

“They could have been, yes.” Bak nodded.

“So you mean Hale was about to collide with something — and we don’t know what that was — but then he put on the brakes and swerved around it?” Marcus went on.

“Yes.”

“And then there was a vehicle in the oncoming lane?” Jacobsen nodded. It sounded plausible.