Bak slowly sat down. Thoughts were clearly swirling around in his head. Of course he’d been involved in tons of cases since then, and the workload in the department had always been onerous, but damned if Bak wasn’t feeling an urge to squirm.
“Do you think we can still rule out the possibility that some sort of crime was committed?” Carl turned to look at his boss. “What do you think, Marcus?”
“We assume that you’re going to investigate the circumstances surrounding Daniel Hale’s death. Am I right, Carl?”
“We’re already working on that.” Again he turned to Bak. “I’ve got a former colleague up in Hornb?k in the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries who’s really on the ball and knows how to think.” He tossed the photos on the desk in front of Marcus. “If it hadn’t been for Hardy, I wouldn’t have come in contact with a photographer by the name of Jonas Hess and acquired a couple of photos. They prove that Merete Lynggaard brought her briefcase home with her from Christiansborg on her last day there; they catch her lesbian secretary showing a great interest in her boss; there are ones of Merete having a conversation with someone on the stairs of Christiansborg a few days before she disappeared. A meeting that apparently upset her.” He pointed to the photo of her face and the uneasy look in her eyes. “It’s true that we only have a picture of the guy from the back, but if you compare his hair and posture and height, he actually looks a lot like Daniel Hale, even though that’s not who he is.” Carl then placed one of the photos of Hale from the InterLab brochure next to the others.
“Now I ask you, Borge Bak: Don’t you think it’s rather odd for her briefcase to disappear somewhere between Christiansborg and Stevns? Because you never did find it, did you? And don’t you think it’s also odd that Daniel Hale should die the day after Merete’s disappearance?”
Bak shrugged. Of course he thought so; the idiot just didn’t want to admit it.
“Briefcases go missing,” he said. “She could have left it at a gas station or somewhere else on her way home. We searched her house and her car, which was still on the ferry. We did what we could.”
“Oh, right. OK, you say she might have forgotten it at a gas station, but are you sure about that? As far as I can tell from her bank statement, she didn’t take care of any errands on her way home that day. You didn’t do your homework very well, did you, Bak?”
By now Bak looked ready to explode. “I’m telling you that we put a lot of effort into searching for that briefcase.”
“I think both Bak and I realize that there’s more work for us to do here,” the boss tried to mediate.
More work for “us,” he’d said. Was everybody suddenly going to start meddling in the case?
Carl looked away from his boss. No, of course Marcus Jacobsen didn’t mean anything by it. Because no help was ever going to be forthcoming from upstairs. Carl knew all too well how things were run in this place.
“I’m going to ask you again, Bak. Do you think we’ve covered everything now? You didn’t include Hale in your report, and there was nothing about Karen Mortensen’s observations regarding Uffe Lynggaard. Is there anything else missing, Borge? Can you tell me that? I could use some support right now. Do you get it?”
Bak stared down at the floor as he rubbed his nose. In a second he’d raise his other hand to stroke his comb- over. He could have jumped up and made a hell of a ruckus, considering all the insinuations and accusations being leveled at him. That would have been perfectly understandable, but when it came right down to it, Bak was a detective with a capital
Jacobsen gave Carl a look that said “take it easy,” and so Carl kept his mouth shut. He agreed with Marcus. Bak should be given a little time to think.
They sat like that for a whole minute before Bak raised his hand to touch his comb-over. “The skid marks,” he said. “The skid marks from the Daniel Hale accident, I mean.”
“What about them?”
Bak looked up. “As it says in the report, there were none on the road from either of the vehicles. I mean not even a shadow of a mark. It seemed as if Hale wasn’t paying attention and simply veered over the line into the other lane. Then: Kapowwww!” He clapped his hands together. “No one managed to react before the collision occurred. That was the assumption.”
“Yeah, that’s what it says in the police report. Why are you mentioning this now?”
“I was driving past the accident site a few weeks later and remembered where it happened, so I stopped to take a look.”
“And?”
“As the report said, there were no skid marks, but it was easy to see where the accident occurred. They hadn’t yet removed the shattered, scorched tree or repaired the wall, and tracks from the other vehicle were still visible in the field.”
“But? You’re leading up to something here, right?”
Bak nodded. “But then I discovered that there actually were some marks seventy-five feet farther along the road toward Tastrup. They were already rather blurry, but I could see they were quite short, only about a foot and a half long. And I thought to myself: What if these marks were from the same accident?”
Carl was having trouble following Bak and was annoyed when his boss beat him to it. “So they were marks left by someone trying to avoid a collision?” Marcus asked.
“They could have been, yes.” Bak nodded.
“So you mean Hale was about to collide with something-and we don’t know what that was-but then he put on the brakes and swerved around it?” Marcus went on.
“Yes.”
“And then there was a vehicle in the oncoming lane?” Jacobsen nodded. It sounded plausible.
Carl raised his hand. “The report says that the collision occurred in the oncoming lane. But it sounds like you’re saying that wasn’t necessarily the case. You think it happened in the middle of the road, and at that spot the oncoming vehicle had nothing to do with it. Am I right?”
Bak took a deep breath. “That’s what I thought for a moment, but then I decided otherwise. But now I can see it might have been a possibility, yes. Something or someone could have come into his lane, so Hale had to swerve, and then an oncoming vehicle rammed into his car at full speed right near the central line. Maybe even deliberately. Maybe we could have found signs of acceleration farther along in the oncoming lane if we’d gone another hundred yards down the road. Perhaps the other vehicle sped up in order to be in the perfect position to ram Hale’s car as he swerved into the center of the road to avoid colliding with someone or something.”
“And if that something was a person who stepped into the lane, and if that person and the individual who ran into Hale were in cahoots, then it’s no longer an accident. It’s homicide. And if that’s true, there’s also reason to believe that Merete Lynggaard’s disappearance was part of the same crime,” concluded Jacobsen, jotting down a few notes.
“It’s possible.” Bak was frowning. He wasn’t feeling very good about things at the moment.
Carl stood up. “There were no witnesses, so we’re not going to find out anything more. Right now we’re looking for the driver of the other vehicle.” He turned to face Bak, who seemed to have shrunk inside his black leather jacket.
“I had a suspicion things might have happened the way you just described, Bak. So I just want you to know that you’ve been a big help, in spite of everything. Be sure to come and see me if you remember anything else, OK?”
Bak nodded. He was looking solemn. This had nothing to do with his personal reputation; it had to do with a professional assignment and resolving it properly. The man deserved some respect for that.
Carl almost felt like giving him a pat on the back.
“I have the good and the bad news after my drive to Stevns, Carl,” said Assad.
Carl sighed. “I don’t care which I hear first, Assad. Just go ahead and fire away.”
Assad perched himself on the edge of Carl’s desk. Before long he’d be sitting on Carl’s lap.
“OK, the bad first.” If it was normal for him to accompany bad news with that kind of smile, then he was really going to split his sides laughing when he delivered the good news.
“The man who drove into Daniel Hale’s car is dead too,” Assad said, clearly eager to see Carl’s reaction. “Lis phoned and said it. I have written it just down here.” He pointed to a number of Arabic symbols that could just as well have meant it was going to snow in the Lofoten Islands in the morning.
Carl didn’t have the energy to react. It was so annoying and so typical. Of course the man was dead. Had he
