“Well, the home help did not really know about that, Carl. She never saw where Merete put it, but she thought then that it was either in the front hall or the utility room.”
“How the hell were you able to find it near the furnace in the utility room when the whole Rapid Response Team couldn’t? Wasn’t it visible? And why was it still there? I have a pretty good feeling that those antique dealers are very meticulous when it comes to cleaning. How’d you find it?”
“The antique dealer gave me complete permission to look around the house on my own, so I just played it all through in my head.” He tapped his knuckles on his skull. “I kicked off my shoes and hung my coat on the hook in the utility room. I just pretended, because the hook was not there anymore. But then I pictured in my head that she maybe was holding something in both hands. Papers in one hand and the briefcase in the other. And then I thought that she could not take off her coat without first putting the other things down that she had in her hands first.”
“And the furnace was the closest thing?”
“Yes, Carl. Just right next to me.”
“But afterward, why didn’t she take the briefcase with her into the living room or her home office?”
“I will get to that, Carl, just in a minute. I looked up at the furnace, but the briefcase was not there so. I did not think it would be either. But do you know what I saw, Carl?”
Carl just stared at him. Obviously Assad would answer his own question.
“I saw that just between the furnace and the ceiling there was at least a whole three feet of air.”
“Fantastic,” replied Carl feebly.
“And then I thought that she would not lay the briefcase down on the dirty furnace because it once belonged to her father, so she took care of it.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“She did not
“So that’s what she did, and then it toppled over behind the furnace.”
Assad’s smile was confirmation enough. “The rip on the other side is new. See for yourself.”
Carl closed the briefcase and turned it around. It didn’t look very new, in his opinion.
“I wiped off the briefcase because it was covered with dust, so maybe the rip looks a little dark now. But it looked very fresh when I found it. This is true, Carl.”
“Confound it, Assad — you wiped off the briefcase? And I suppose you’ve also touched everything inside?”
He was still nodding, but with less enthusiasm.
“Assad.” Carl took a deep breath so he wouldn’t sound too harsh. “Next time you find something important in a case, you keep your mitts off it, OK?”
“Mitts?”
“Your hands, damn it, Assad. You can destroy valuable evidence when you do something like that. Do you understand?”
He nodded. No longer enthusiastic. “I pulled my sleeve down over my hand, Carl.”
“OK. Good thinking, Assad. So you think the other rip happened in the same way?” He turned the briefcase around again. The two rips were undeniably similar. So the old rip hadn’t come from the car accident back in 1986.
“Yes. I think it was not the first time that the briefcase fell behind the furnace. I found it completely squeezed tight in between the pipes behind the oil furnace. I had to tug and pull to get it out. Merete tried the same thing, I am just sure of that.”
“And why didn’t it ever fall down more than twice?”
“It probably did, because there was a big draft from the wind in the utility room when you opened the door, but maybe it did not fall all the way down.”
“Let’s go back to my other question. Why didn’t she take it with her into the house?”
“She wanted to have her peace when she was home. She did not want to hear her mobile telephone, Carl.” Assad raised his eyebrows, and his eyes grew big. “This is what I think.”
Carl looked inside the briefcase. Merete brought it home; that much seemed logical. Inside were her appointment diary and maybe also notes that in certain situations might prove useful. But she usually brought home lots of documents to review; there was always plenty of work she could be doing. She had a landline, but very few people had that number. Her cell phone was for a wider circle; that was the number on her business card.
“And you don’t think she could hear her cell phone inside the house if she left it in her briefcase in the utility room?”
“No way,” said Assad in English.
Carl hadn’t realized he knew any English.
“So, here you are. Two grown men having a cozy little chat?” said a bright voice behind them.
Neither of them had heard Lis from the homicide department come down the hallway.
“I have a couple more things for you. They came in from the southeast Jutland district.” Her perfume filled the room, almost a match for Assad’s incense, but with an entirely different effect. “They apologize for the delay, but some of the staff have been off sick.”
She handed the folders to Assad, who was profuse in his eagerness to accommodate, then gave Carl a look that could stir any man deep in the groin.
He stared at Lis’s moist lips and tried to recall when he’d last had any intimate contact with the opposite sex. The image of a pink two-room apartment belonging to a divorcee clearly appeared all too clearly in his mind. She’d had lavender blossoms in a bowl of water and tea-light candles and a bloodred cloth draped over the bedside lamp. But he couldn’t remember the woman’s face.
“What did you say to Bak, Carl?” asked Lis.
He emerged from his erotic reverie and looked into her light blue eyes, which had turned a bit darker now.
“Bak? Is he wandering around upstairs whining?”
“Not at all. He went home. But his colleagues said that he was as pale as a ghost after talking to you in the boss’s office.”
Carl connected Merete Lynggaard’s cell phone to the charger, hoping the battery wasn’t dead. Assad’s eager fingers — shirtsleeves notwithstanding — had touched everything inside the briefcase, so a forensic examination would be hopeless. The damage had already been done.
Only three pages in the notebook had any writing on them; the rest were blank. The notes were mostly about the municipal home-help arrangement and schedule planning, respectively. Very disappointing and no doubt indicative of the daily life that Merete had left behind.
Then he stuck his hand into a side pocket and pulled out three or four crumpled pieces of paper. The first was a receipt from April 3, 2001, for a Jack & Jones jacket.
The rest were some of those folded sheets of white A4 paper that could be found in the bottom of any healthy boy’s schoolbag. Handwritten in pencil, more or less illegible, and of course undated.
Carl aimed the desk lamp at the top one, smoothing it out a bit. Only ten words. “Can we talk after my presentation regarding the tax reform?” Signed with the initials TB. Countless possibilities, but “Tage Baggesen” would be a good guess. At least that was what Carl chose to believe.
He smiled. Yeah, that was a good one. Baggesen had wanted to talk to Merete Lynggaard, had he? Well, it probably hadn’t done him much good.
Carl smoothed out the next piece of paper and quickly scanned the message; it gave him an entirely different feeling in his bones. This time the tone was very personal. Baggesen was backed into a corner. It said:
“I don’t know what will happen if you go public with it, Merete. I beg you not to. TB.”
Then Carl picked up the last sheet of paper. The writing had been almost completely rubbed off, as if it had been taken out of the briefcase over and over. He turned it this way and that, deciphering the sentences one word at a time.
“I thought we understood each other, Merete. The whole situation pains me deeply. I implore you again: Please don’t let it go any further. I’m in the process of divesting myself of the whole thing.”
This time there were no initials serving as a signature, but there was no doubt that the handwriting was the
