days. A former electrician’s shop that now housed a couple of buxom girls that the vice squad had had a lot of trouble with.
Carl glanced at Assad and considered whistling to see if there was still life in him. It wasn’t unheard of for people to die in the middle of a sentence, with their eyes wide open.
“Anybody home, Assad?” he asked, not expecting an answer.
Carl reached across him to open the glove compartment and take out a semiflattened packet of Lucky Strikes.
“Carl, would you mind not smoking? It makes the car stink,” said Assad, sounding surprisingly alert.
If a little smoke was going to bother him, he could walk home.
“Stop over there,” Assad went on. Maybe he’d had the same idea.
Carl shut the glove compartment and found a space to pull over near one of the side roads leading down to the beach.
“This is all wrong, Carl.” Assad turned to look at him, his eyes dark. “I have thought about what we saw out there. It was all wrong everywhere.”
Carl nodded slowly. There was no fooling this guy.
“There were four televisions inside the old woman’s house.”
“Really? I only saw one.”
“There were three next to each other, not very big, over by the end of her bed. They were sort of covered up, but I could see the light from them.”
He must have eyes like an eagle paired with an owl, thought Carl. “Three TVs that were on, covered by a blanket? Could you really see it from that distance, Assad? It was almost pitch dark in there.”
“They were there then, all the way down by the edge of the bed, up against the wall. Not very big. Almost like some kind of. .” He was searching for the word. “Some kind of. .”
“Monitors?”
Assad nodded. “And you know what, Carl? I have been realizing more and more in my head. There were three or four monitors. You could see a weak gray or green light through the blanket. What were they there for? Why were they on? And why were they covered up, like we must not see them?”
Carl looked at the road where trucks were rumbling their way toward town. Those were good questions.
“And now one more thing then, Carl.”
Now it was Carl who wasn’t really paying attention. He drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel. If they drove back to police headquarters and went through all the proper procedures, it would be at least two hours before they could be back down there.
Then his cell phone rang again. If it was Vigga, he’d just hang up. Why did she think he was at her disposal night and day?
But it was Lis. “Marcus Jacobsen wants to see you in his office, Carl. Where are you?”
“He’ll have to wait, Lis. I’m on my way to do a search. Is it about the newspaper article?”
“I’m not really sure, but it might be. You know how he is. He gets awfully quiet whenever anybody writes something bad about us.”
“Then tell him that Uffe Lynggaard has been found, and he’s fine. And tell him that we’re working on the case.”
“Which case?”
“The one that will make those damned newspapers write something positive about me and the department for a change.”
Then he swung the car into a U-turn, and considered switching on the flashing blue lights.
“What were you about to say to me before, Assad?”
“About the cigarettes.”
“What do you mean?”
“How long have you smoked the same brand, Carl?”
He frowned. How long had Lucky Strikes existed?
“People do not just change their brands like that, right? And she had ten packs of Prince on the table, Carl. Brand new, unopened packs. And she had such completely yellow fingers. But her son did not.”
“What are you getting at?”
“She smoked Prince with filter tips, and her son didn’t smoke. I am pretty sure.”
“So?”
“Why were there then no filters on the cigarettes that were lying almost on top in the ashtray?”
That’s when Carl turned on the siren and blue lights.
37. The same day
The work took time because the floor was smooth and she didn’t want the steady jolting of her upper body to arouse the suspicions of the people out there who were monitoring her on their screens.
She’d been sitting on the floor in the middle of the room for most of the night with her back to the cameras, sharpening the long piece of plastic stiffener that she’d twisted until she broke it in half the day before. No matter how ironic it might seem, this stiffener from the hood of her jacket was going to be her ticket out of this world.
She put the two pieces on her lap and ran her fingers over them. One would soon have a point like an awl; the other she’d already shaped into a nail file with a knife-sharp edge. That was probably the one she would use when the time came. She was afraid the pointed piece wouldn’t make a big enough hole in her artery, and if it didn’t happen fast, the blood on the floor would give her away. Not for a moment did she doubt that they’d drop the pressure in the room the second they discovered what she was up to. So her suicide had to be done efficiently and quickly.
She didn’t want to die the other way.
When she heard the voices in the loudspeakers from somewhere out in the hall, she stuck the stiffeners in her jacket pocket and hunched over, as if she had dozed off in that position. When she sat like that, Lasse often yelled at her, and she’d refuse to respond, so it was nothing unusual.
She sat there with her legs crossed, staring at the long shadow cast by her body from the floodlights. Up there on the wall was her true self. A sharply delineated silhouette of a human being sinking into decay. Wisps of hair hanging to her shoulders, a worn-out jacket wrapped around nothing. A remnant from the past that would soon disappear when the light was put out. Today was April 4, 2007. She had forty-one days left to live, but she planned to kill herself five days early, on May 10th. On that day Uffe would turn thirty-four, and she would think about him and send him thoughts of love and tenderness and about how beautiful life could be, as she slit her wrists. His shining face would be the last thing she saw. Uffe, her beloved brother.
“We’ve got to hurry!” she heard the woman shout through the loudspeakers on the other side of the glass panes. “Lasse will be here in ten minutes, so we need to get everything ready. Pull yourself together, boy!” She sounded frantic.
Merete heard a clattering sound behind the mirrored panes, and she looked over at the airlock. But no buckets appeared, and her inner clock told her it was too early.
“But we need to have another storage battery in here, Mother!” the gaunt man shouted back in reply. “There’s not enough charge in this one. We can’t set off the explosion if we don’t change it. That’s what Lasse told me a couple of days ago.”
The explosion? An icy wave rushed through Merete’s body. Was it going to happen now?
She threw herself on to her knees and tried to think about Uffe as she used all her strength to rub the knife- shaped plastic stiffener against the smooth concrete floor. She might have only ten minutes. If she made the cut deep enough, she could lose consciousness in five. That was the important thing.
She was breathing hard, whimpering as the stiffener slowly changed shape. It was still too dull. She glanced
