out. He saw Assad’s expression as he cursed himself for not turning off the ringtone.
It was Vigga. Nobody could match her ability to call him at the most inconvenient moments. He’d stood in the ooze of putrefying corpses as she asked him to bring home cream for their coffee. She’d called him when his cell phone lay in his jacket pocket under a bag in the police car, as he was in hot pursuit of some suspects. Vigga was good at that sort of thing.
He set the ringtone to OFF.
It was then that he raised his head and looked straight into the eyes of a tall, gaunt man in his twenties. His head was strangely elongated, almost deformed, and one entire side of his face was marred by the craters and stretched skin created by burn scars.
“You can’t come here,” he said in a voice that belonged neither to an adult nor a child.
Carl showed him his police badge, but the man didn’t seem to understand what it meant.
“I’m a police officer,” Carl said in a friendly tone. “We’d like to talk to your mother. We know this is where she lives. I’d appreciate it if you’d ask her if we could come in for a moment.”
The young man didn’t seem impressed by either the badge or the two men. So he probably wasn’t as simple-minded as he first appeared.
“How long am I going to have to wait?” asked Carl brusquely. The man gave a start. Then he disappeared inside the house.
A few minutes passed, as Carl felt the pressure increase in his chest. He cursed the fact that he hadn’t taken his service weapon out of the armory at police headquarters even once since he’d come back from sick leave.
“Stay behind me, Assad,” he said. He could just picture the headlines in tomorrow’s newspaper: “Police detective sacrifices assistant in shooting drama. For the third day in a row, Deputy Police Superintendent Carl Morck from Department Q creates a scandal.”
He gave Assad a shove to emphasize the seriousness of the situation and then took up position close to the door. If they came out carrying a shotgun or anything like that, at least his assistant’s head wouldn’t be the first thing the muzzle pointed at.
Then the young man came out and invited them in.
She was sitting in a wheelchair, smoking a cigarette. It was hard to guess her age, since she looked so gray and wrinkled and worn out, but judging by the age of her son, she couldn’t be more than sixty-one or sixty-two. She sat hunched over and her legs looked strangely awkward, like branches that had been snapped in half and then had to find some way to grow back together. The car crash had really left its mark on her; it was pitiful and sad to see.
Carl looked around. It was a huge room. A good twenty-five hundred square feet or more, but in spite of the twelve-foot-high ceiling, the place reeked of tobacco. He followed the spiraling smoke from her cigarette up to the skylights. There were only ten Velux windows, so the room was quite dim.
There were no walls for separate rooms. The kitchen was closest to the front door, the bathroom off to one side. The living-room area, filled with furniture from IKEA and with cheap rugs on the cement floor, extended for fifteen or twenty yards and then ended at the space where the woman presumably slept.
Aside from the nauseating air in the room, everything was meticulously neat. This was where she watched TV and read magazines and apparently spent most of her life. Her husband had died, so now she had to manage as best she could. At least she had her son to help her out.
Carl saw Assad’s eyes making a slow survey of the room. There was something devilish in his eyes as they slid over everything, occasionally pausing to zoom in on some detail. He was extremely focused, his arms hanging at his sides and feet planted firmly on the floor.
The woman was reasonably friendly, although she shook hands only with Carl. He made the introductions and told her not to be nervous. They were looking for her elder son, Lars Henrik. They wanted to ask him some questions; nothing special, it was just a routine matter. Could she tell them where they might find him?
She smiled. “Lasse is a seaman,” she said. So she called him Lasse. “He’s not home right now, but he’ll be back ashore in a month. So I’ll let him know. Do you have a business card I can give him?”
“No, unfortunately.” Carl attempted a boyish smile, but the woman wasn’t buying it. “I’ll send you my card when I get back to the office. I’d be happy to.” He tried the smile again. This one was better timed. It was the golden rule: first say something positive, then smile in order to seem sincere. To do it in reverse could mean anything: flattery, flirtation. Anything that was to one’s advantage. The woman knew that much about life, at least.
Carl made as if to leave and grabbed hold of Assad’s sleeve. “All right, Mrs. Jensen, we have a deal. By the way, what shipping line does your son happen to work for?”
She recognized the sequence of statement and smile. “Oh, I wish I could remember. He works on so many different ships.” And then came her smile. Carl had seen yellow teeth before, but never any as yellow as hers.
“He’s a first officer. Isn’t that right?”
“No, he’s a steward. Lasse is a good cook. He’s always been good with food.”
Carl tried to picture the boy with his arm on Dennis Knudsen’s shoulder. The boy they called Atomos because his deceased father had manufactured something for nuclear reactors. When had the son developed his knowledge about cooking? In the home of the foster family who beat him? In Godhavn? When he was a young boy at home with his mother? Carl had also been through a lot in life, but he couldn’t fry an egg. If it weren’t for Morten Holland, he didn’t know what he’d do.
“It’s wonderful when things go well for one’s children. Are you looking forward to seeing your brother again?” Carl asked the disfigured young man who was watching them suspiciously, as if they’d come to steal something.
His gaze shifted to his mother, but her expression didn’t change. So her son wasn’t about to say a word; that much was clear.
“Where is your son’s ship sailing at the moment?”
She looked at Carl, her yellow teeth slowly disappearing behind her parched lips. “Lasse spends a lot of time sailing in the Baltic, but I think he’s in the North Sea right now. Sometimes he goes out on one ship and comes home on another.”
“It must be a big shipping line. Don’t you remember what it’s called? Can you describe the company’s logo?”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m not so good at things like that.”
Again Carl glanced at the young man; it was obvious he knew what they were talking about. He could probably draw a picture of the damned logo if his mother would let him.
“But it is painted on the van that comes here a couple of times every week,” Assad interjected. That was not well timed. Now the guy’s eyes looked uneasy, and the woman drew smoke deep into her lungs. Her face was obscured by a thick cloud when she blew it out again.
“Well, it’s not something we’re really sure about,” Carl managed to add. “One of your neighbors thought he’d seen it, but he could be mistaken.” He tugged at Assad’s arm. “Thank you for talking to us today,” he continued. “Ask your son Lasse to call me when he gets back. Then we can take care of these couple of questions once and for all.”
They headed for the door as the woman rolled after them. “Push me outside, Hans,” she said to her son. “I need some fresh air.”
Carl knew that she didn’t want to let them out of her sight until they’d left the property. If there had been a car in the courtyard or back here, where they stood, he would have thought she was trying to hide the fact that Lars Henrik Jensen was inside one of the buildings. But Carl’s intuition told him otherwise. Her elder son wasn’t here; she just wanted to get rid of them.
“It’s an impressive group of buildings you have here. Was this a factory at one time?”
The woman was right behind them, puffing on another cigarette as her wheelchair lumbered along the path. Her son was pushing it, hands tightly gripped on the handles. He seemed very agitated inside that ruined face of his.
“My husband had a factory that manufactured sophisticated linings for nuclear reactors. We had just moved here from Koge when he died.”
“Yes, I remember reading about it. I’m very sorry.” Carl pointed to the two low buildings in front of them.
