the murder?”
The four men looked at him as if he’d desecrated a grave.
Bak’s eyes had a dead expression. “It’s not your case, Carl. We’ll talk later. Believe it or not, we’re really busy up here.”
He nodded. “Oh, sure, I can see that in your well-fed faces. Of course you’re busy. I imagine that you’ve already sent people out to search the witness’s place of residence after she was hospitalized, right?”
The others exchanged glances. Annoyed, but also with a questioning look.
So they hadn’t. Excellent.
Marcus Jacobsen had just sat down in his office when Carl came in. As usual, the homicide chief was well groomed. The parting in his hair was sharp as a knife, his eyes attentive and alert.
“Marcus, did you search the witness’s residence after her suicide attempt?” asked Carl, pointing at the case folder that was lying in the middle of Jacobsen’s desk.
“What do you mean?”
“You haven’t found the piece missing from the victim’s ear, have you?”
“No, not yet. Are you saying that it might be in the witness’s home?”
“If I were you, I’d go and look for it, boss.”
“If it really was sent to her, I’m sure she got rid of it.”
“So look through the garbage cans down in the yard. And take a good look in the toilet.”
“It would have been flushed away by now, Carl.”
“Haven’t you heard the story about the shit that kept reappearing no matter how many times the toilet was flushed?”
“OK, Carl. I’ll take it under advisement.”
“The pride of the department, Mr. Yes-man Bak, didn’t want to talk to me.”
“Well, then you’ll just have to wait, Carl. Your cases aren’t about to run off anywhere.”
“I just wanted you to know. It’s going to set me back in my schedule.”
“Then I suggest you take a look at one of the other cases in the meantime.” He picked up his pen and tapped it on the edge of the desk. “So, about that strange guy you have working for you downstairs… You’re not involving him in any of the investigative work, are you?”
“Well, you know, considering the huge department I’m in charge of, there’s not much chance that he’ll hear about what goes on.”
Jacobsen tossed his pen on to one of the piles of documents. “Carl, you’ve taken an oath of confidentiality, and the man isn’t a police officer. Just keep that in mind.”
Carl nodded. He’d be the one to decide what was discussed and where. “How on earth did you find Assad? Through the employment office?”
“I have no idea. Ask Lars Bjorn. Or ask the man himself.”
Carl raised a finger. “By the way, I’d like to have a floor plan of the basement, to scale, and showing the points of the compass.”
Jacobsen was looking a bit tired again. There weren’t many people who dared make such strange requests of him. “You can print out a floor plan from the departmental intranet, Carl. It’s easy!”
“Here,” said Carl, pointing at the floor plan spread out in front of Assad. “Here you can see that wall over there, and here’s where you’ve put your prayer rug. And here’s the arrow pointing north. So now you can position the rug in exactly the right place.”
The eyes that turned to look up at him were full of respect. They were going to make a good team.
“Two people called with the telephone for you. I told both of them that you would be pleased to call them back sometime.”
“Who were they?”
“That man who is the director in Frederikssund, and a lady who talked like a machine that cuts through metal.”
Carl sighed heavily. “Vigga. That’s my wife.” So she’d found out what his new phone number was. Any chance of peace and quiet was now gone.
“Wife? You have a wife?”
“Oh, Assad, it’s too complicated to get into right now. Let’s get to know each other better first.”
Assad pursed his lips and nodded. A trace of sympathy passed over his solemn face.
“Assad, how exactly did you get this job, anyway?”
“I know Lars Bjorn.”
“You know him?”
Assad smiled. “Yes, I do. I was in his office every single day for a whole month to get job.”
“You pestered Lars Bjorn about getting a job?”
“Yes, I love police.”
Carl didn’t call Vigga back until he was in his living room in Ronneholt Park, breathing in the aroma of the hash that Morten was cooking while listening to emotional operatic arias. He’d thrown together the concoction from what had once been a genuine Parma ham from Super-Best.
Vigga was OK in small doses, as long as Carl was allowed to decide how much of her to take. It had been difficult over the years, but now that she’d left him, certain rules of the game applied.
“Damn it, Vigga,” he said. “I don’t like you calling me at work. You know how busy we are.”
“Carl, sweetheart. Didn’t Morten tell you that I’m freezing out here?”
“I’m not surprised. It’s a garden cottage, Vigga. It was cobbled together out of shitty building materials. Old boards and crates that were already surplus and worthless in 1945. You can just move somewhere else.”
“I’m not moving back in with you, Carl.”
He took a deep breath. “I certainly hope not. It would be hard to squeeze you and your assembly line of confirmation-aged lovers into the sauna downstairs with Morten. But there are plenty of other houses and apartments that do have central heating.”
“I’ve got a really good solution for the whole thing.”
No matter what she had in mind, it already sounded expensive. “A really good solution would be a divorce, Vigga,” said Carl. Sooner or later it had to happen. Then she would demand half the value of the house, and during the past few years it had increased considerably, brought on by the insane rise in the housing market in spite of fluctuations. He should have simply demanded a divorce while houses still cost half of what they did today. It was as simple as that. But it was too late now, and he’d be damned if he was going to move.
He turned his eyes to the vibrating ceiling under Jesper’s room. Even if I took out a loan when we divorced, my expenses couldn’t possibly be more than they are now, he thought. In that case, he imagined she’d have to take back responsibility for her son. They had the biggest electricity bill on this side of town; there was no doubt about that. Jesper had to be the energy company’s elite customer number one.
“Divorce? No, I don’t want a divorce, Carl. I’ve tried that before, and it wasn’t a good thing. You know that.”
He shook his head. Then what the hell did she call the situation they’d been living in for the past couple of years?
“I want to have a gallery, Carl. My very own gallery.”
OK, here it came. In his mind he saw Vigga’s paintings, which were nothing more than meter-high, deranged blotches of pink and bronze gilding. A gallery? Good idea, if she wanted to make more space in her garden cottage.
“A gallery, you say? And I imagine that it will have a gigantic furnace. So then you can sit there all day, warming yourself on all the millions of kroner that are going to come pouring in.” Sure. He could see the whole scam.
“You’ve always been the sarcastic type,” said Vigga. And then she laughed. It was the laugh that got to him every time. That damn seductive laugh. “But it’s really a fantastic idea, Carl. There would be so many possibilities if I had my own gallery. Can’t you just picture it? And maybe one day Jesper will have a famous mother. Wouldn’t
