Oh, that felt good. In spite of the stench from the farmer’s field that wafted past him like a disease, the air out there felt almost refreshing.
When he straightened up, he felt fine.
He picked up his cell. “OK, Assad, I’m back. We can’t have a passport counterfeiter doing work for us. Do you hear me?”
“Who says he is a passport counterfeiter? I did not say that.”
“So what then?”
“He was just good at doing this kind of thing, where he came from. He can remove stamp marks so you cannot see them. It should be simple for him to remove a little ink. You do not need to know more then. And I will not tell him what he is doing this for. He is fast, Carl. And it will cost nothing. He owes me favors.”
“How fast?”
“We have it on Monday if we want.”
“Then go ahead and give him the shit, Assad. Go ahead.”
Assad muttered something on the other end of the line. Presumably “OK” in Arabic.
“Just one more thing, Carl. Mrs. Sorensen from upstairs in the homicide department wants me to tell you that the witness, that woman in the cyclist case, has started to talk a little bit. And she—”
“Stop right there, Assad. That’s not our case.” Carl got back in the car. “We have enough to do as it is.”
“Mrs. Sorensen did not say it exactly to me, but I think upstairs they want your opinion, I mean without asking you, like directly.”
“Go up there and pump her for information, Assad. And then go and visit Hardy on Monday morning and tell him about it. I’m sure it would amuse him more than me. Take a cab out there, and then I’ll see you back at headquarters later. OK? In the meantime, keep your chin up, Assad. Say hello to Hardy for me and tell him I’ll be out to visit him sometime next week.”
Carl ended the conversation and peered out the windshield, which looked as though it had been through a shower. But it wasn’t rain; he could smell what it was from inside the car. It was pig’s piss, a la carte. The springtime country menu.
Sitting on Carl’s desk was a sumptuously decorated monster of a tea apparatus, sputtering away. If Assad had thought that the oil flame would keep the mint tea good and hot until his boss returned, he was mistaken, because by now all the water in the kettle had boiled off and the bottom was making creaking noises. Carl blew out the flame and dropped heavily onto his chair, noticing the pressure in his chest again. He’d heard it all before. A warning, then relief. Then maybe another brief warning and after that: you’re dead. Bright prospects for a man who had buckets full of years that had to be poured out before he could retire.
He took out Mona Ibsen’s business card and weighed it in his hand. Twenty minutes next to her soft, warm body and he’d probably feel much better. The question was whether he’d feel just as good if he had to make do with the company of her soft, warm eyes.
He picked up the phone and punched in her number; as it rang, the pressure in his chest returned. Was it a life-affirming heartbeat or a warning of the opposite? How could he tell?
He was gasping for air as she answered the phone.
“Carl Morck here,” he said awkwardly. “I’m ready to make a full confession.”
“Then you’d better go over to St. Peter’s Church,” she said drily.
“No, honestly. I had a panic attack today; at least I think that’s what it was. I’m not feeling well.”
“All right then. Monday at eleven o’clock. Should I phone in a prescription for a sedative, or can you make it through the weekend?”
“I can make it,” he said, although he wasn’t too sure about that as he put down the phone.
Time kept ticking away mercilessly. In less than two hours Morten would be home from his afternoon shift at the video shop.
Carl took Merete Lynggaard’s phone out of the charger and switched it on. It said: “Enter PIN code.” At least the battery was still working. Good old reliable Siemens.
He punched in 1-2-3-4 and got an error message. Then he tried 4-3-2-1, and got the same message. After that he had only one shot left before he’d have to send the phone off to the experts. He opened the case file and found Merete’s birth date. Of course, she might just as well have used Uffe’s birth date. He leafed through the documents until he found it. Then again, it might also be a combination of the two, or something else altogether. He decided to combine the first two digits of their birth dates, starting with Uffe’s. He punched in the numbers.
When the display showed a smiling Uffe, with his arm around Merete’s neck, the pressure in Carl’s chest vanished for a moment. Someone else might have uttered a triumphant cheer, but Carl didn’t have the energy for that. Instead, he leaned back and hauled his feet up on the desk.
As the constriction in his chest returned, he opened the list of incoming and outgoing calls and went through all the numbers from February 15, 2002, until the day Merete Lynggaard disappeared. It was a long list. Some of them he’d have to look up in the companies’ archives. Numbers that had been changed and then changed again. It sounded tedious, but after an hour, a clear pattern emerged: during the entire period, Merete had communicated only with colleagues and spokespersons for various special-interest groups. Thirty calls alone were from her own secretary, including the very last call, made on March 1.
That meant that any calls from the fake Daniel Hale must have gone through the landline at Christiansborg. If there had been any calls, that is. Carl sighed and used his foot to push a stack of papers to the middle of his desk. His right leg was itching to give Borge Bak a good kick up the backside. If the original investigative team had ever had a call list for Merete’s office phone, it must have been lost, because there was nothing like that in the case file.
Well, he’d just have to leave that issue for Assad to take care of on Monday morning, while he went to see Mona Ibsen for a therapy session.
The selection of Playmobil toys in the toy shop in Allerod wasn’t bad; on the contrary. But the prices sure were steep. He couldn’t fathom how the local citizenry could afford to bring kids into the world. He chose the absolute cheapest set he could find with more than two figures — a police car with two officers for two hundred sixty-nine kroner and seventy-five ore, and asked for the receipt. He was pretty certain that Morten would want to come in and exchange the set, anyway.
As soon as Morten arrived home, Carl confessed what he’d done. He took the pieces that he’d borrowed out of the plastic bag and handed his lodger the newly purchased set as well. He told Morten he was more than sorry, and he would never do it again. In fact, he would never set foot in Morten’s domain when he wasn’t home. Morten reacted as Carl had expected, but it was still a surprise to see how this big, flabby example of how destructive a fatty diet and the lack of exercise could be was able to tense up his body with such physical rage. How the human body could quiver so much with indigation or that disappointment could be expressed with so many different words. Not only had he stepped on Morten’s mega-long toes, he had apparently flattened them totally on the laminated parquet floor.
Carl was looking with dismay at the little plastic family standing on the edge of the kitchen table, wishing that this had never happened, when the pressure in his chest returned in a whole new form.
Morten was so busy declaring that Carl would have to find himself a new lodger that he didn’t notice Carl’s distress. Not until he collapsed on the floor with cramps from his neck to his navel. This time the pains were not confined to Carl’s chest. His skin felt too tight, his muscles were surging with blood circulation, and he had stomach-muscle spasms that forced his internal organs up against his spine. It didn’t really hurt, but he almost couldn’t breathe.
In a matter of seconds Morten was bending over him, his eyes wide, asking Carl if he needed a glass of water. A glass of water? What good would that do? Carl thought as his pulse danced to its own irregular beat. Was Morten planning to pour the water over him so his body would have a nice little reminder of a sudden summer shower? Or was he thinking of forcing the water down his throat between his clenched teeth, which at the moment were whistling from the low pressure in his pinioned lungs?
“Yeah, thanks, Morten,” Carl forced himself to say. Anything so they could at least meet halfway, there in the middle of the kitchen floor.
By the time Carl had recovered enough to settle into the most squashed corner of the sofa, Morten’s sense
