twenty bags of snacks. If you don’t show up either, I simply don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“At your gallery? Is that what you mean?”
A couple of sniffles told him that she was about to start sobbing.
“I didn’t know anything about any reception.”
“Hugin sent out fifty invitations the day before yesterday.” She sniffled one last time and then pulled the real Vigga out of the goody bag. “Why can’t I count on your support at least? You’re an investor in the gallery, after all!”
“Try asking your wandering phantom.”
“Who are you calling a phantom? Hugin?”
“Do you have other lice like him crawling all over you?”
“Hugin is just as concerned as I am that this gallery is a success.”
Carl didn’t doubt it. Where else could the man exhibit his torn-off scraps of underwear ads and smashed McDonald’s Happy Meal figures splattered with the cheapest paint you could find?
“I’m just saying, Vigga, that if Einstein actually remembered to post the invitations on Saturday, as you claim, then they won’t show up in anyone’s letter box until they get home from work sometime later today.”
“Oh my God, no! Damn it!” she groaned.
So there was probably a man in black who wasn’t getting laid tonight.
Carl couldn’t resist feeling gleeful.
Tage Baggesen knocked on the doorframe to his office just as Carl was lighting the cigarette that had been yelling and nagging at him for hours.
“Yeah, what is it?” said Carl, his lungs filled with smoke. Then he recognized the man clad in a nicely acquitted state of mild intoxication that sent a scent of cognac and beers wafting into the room.
“I just wanted to apologize for cutting off our phone conversation so abruptly the other day. I needed time to think, now that everything is going to be made public.”
Carl invited Baggesen to sit down and asked if he’d like something to drink, but the MP dismissed the offer with a wave of his hand as he took a seat. No, he wasn’t thirsty.
“Which things did you specifically have in mind?” asked Carl, trying to make it sound as if he had more up his sleeve, which wasn’t the case at all.
“Tomorrow I plan to resign from my position in parliament,” said Baggesen, looking around the room with weary eyes. “I’m going to meet with the chairman after we’re done talking here. Merete told me this would happen if I didn’t listen, but I didn’t want to believe her. And then I did what I never should have done.”
Carl narrowed his eyes. “Then it’s good that the two of us clear the air before you start making confessions to everyone and his uncle.”
The stout man nodded and bowed his head. “I bought some stocks in 2000 and 2001, and made a killing on them.”
“What kind of stocks?”
“All sorts of shit. And then I hired a new stockbroker who advised me to invest in weapons factories in the United States and France.”
Not the sort of thing that the manager at Carl’s local bank in Allerod would recommend to his customers as a sound investment for their savings. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and then stubbed it out in the ashtray. No, Carl could see that these weren’t the kind of investments a leading member of the pacifist Radical Center Party would want to be known for.
“I also leased two of my properties to massage parlors. I didn’t know about it in the beginning, but I soon found out. They were located in Stroby Egede, near where Merete lived, and people were starting to talk. I had a lot of different things going on at the time. Unfortunately, I bragged about my business deals to Merete. I was so in love with her, and she couldn’t have cared less about me. Maybe I was hoping that she’d show more interest in me if I acted like a big shot, but of course it didn’t make any difference.” He reached up to massage the back of his neck. “She wasn’t like that at all.”
Carl fixed his eyes on the cloud of smoke until it was swallowed up by the room. “And she asked you to stop what you were doing?”
“No, she didn’t ask me to stop.”
“What then?”
“She said that she might say something by mistake to her secretary, Marianne Koch. It was clear what she meant. If that secretary found out anything, everybody else would know about it in seconds. Merete just wanted to warn me.”
“Why was she interested in your business affairs?”
“She wasn’t. That was the whole problem.” He sighed and buried his head in his hands. “I’d been making advances for so long that she finally just wanted to get rid of me. And that was how she got her way. I’m positive that if I’d continued pressuring her, she would have leaked the information. I don’t blame her. What the hell was she supposed to do?”
“So you decided to leave her alone, but you kept running your business ventures?”
“I canceled the lease agreements for the massage parlors, but I kept the stocks that I owned. I didn’t sell them until shortly after 9/11.”
Carl nodded. There were plenty of people who had made a fortune from that catastrophe.
“How much did you make?”
Baggesen looked up. “Nearly ten million kroner.”
Carl stuck out his lower lip. “And then you killed Merete because she was going to blow the whistle on you?”
That gave the member of parliament a start. Carl recognized the man’s frightened expression from the last time they’d gone a round together.
“No, no! Why on earth would I do that? What I did wasn’t illegal, you know. The only thing that would have happened is what’s going to happen today.”
“You would have been asked to leave your party instead of resigning?”
Baggesen’s eyes flicked around the room and didn’t stop until he saw his own initials on the list of suspects on the whiteboard.
“You can cross me off your list now,” he said and stood up.
Assad didn’t show up at the office until three o’clock, which was considerably later than would be expected of a man with his modest qualifications and precarious position. For a second Carl weighed how useful it would be to bawl him out, but Assad’s cheerful expression and enthusiasm didn’t exactly invite an ambush.
“What the hell have you been doing all this time?” he asked instead, pointing at the clock.
“Hardy sends you his greetings, Carl. You sent me yourself up there, remember?”
“You’ve been talking to Hardy for seven hours?” He pointed again at the clock.
Assad shook his head. “I told him what I knew about the cyclist murder then, and do you know what he said?”
“He told you who he thinks the killer is?”
Assad looked surprised. “You know Hardy pretty very well, Carl. Yes, that is actually what he did.”
“He didn’t give you a name, though. Am I right?”
“A name? No, but he said to look for a person who was important for the witness’s children then. That it probably was not a teacher or somebody in the day-care centers but somebody they were really dependent on. The ex-husband of the witness or a doctor or maybe someone the children saw a lot. A riding instructor or something. But it had to be a person who had something to do with both of the children. I have also just said it up on the second floor.”
“Oh really,” said Carl, pursing his lips. It was astounding how well informed Assad suddenly was. “I can just imagine Bak must have been over the moon.”
“Over the moon?” Assad considered Carl’s choice of words. “Maybe. How would that make him look?”
Carl shrugged. Now Assad was his old self again. “So what else have you been doing?” Judging by the way Assad’s eyebrows danced, Carl guessed that he had something up his sleeve.
