years and hundreds of interrogations ago. But not anymore. His instincts were grumbling. The way Assad reacted wasn’t quite right.
“You’re actually from Iraq, aren’t you, Assad? And you’ve got skeletons in the closet that would get you deported from Denmark and sent back to where you came from. Am I right?”
Assad’s expression changed again. The lines on his forehead were erased. Maybe he’d caught sight of a way out; maybe he was just telling the truth.
“Iraq? Not at all. Now you are sounding dumb, Carl,” he said, offended. “Come home and see my things, Carl. I brought a suitcase from home. You can talk to my wife. She understands a little English. Or my girls. Then you will know that what I am telling you is right then, Carl. I am a political refugee, and I have been through a lot of bad things. I do not want to talk about it, Carl, so, could you please leave me in peace? It is true that I did not spend a lot of time with Hardy, the way I said, but it is very far, up to Hornb?k. I am trying to help my brother come to Denmark, and that takes time too, Carl. I’m sorry. I will tell you things straight in the future.”
Carl leaned back. He was almost to the point where he wanted to smother his skeptical brain in the sugar water that Assad was dishing out. “I don’t understand how you could acclimate yourself so quickly to doing police work, Assad. I certainly appreciate your help. You’re a spooky kind of guy, but you do have skills. Where does it come from?”
“Spooky? What is that? Something to do with ghosts and things like that?” He gave Carl a guileless look. Yes, he did have skills, all right. Maybe he had a natural talent. Maybe everything he’d said was true. Perhaps it was just Carl who was turning into a sulky grouch.
“It doesn’t say anything about your education in the file, Assad. What kind of training did you have?”
He shrugged. “There was not very much, Carl. My father owned a small company that sold tinned goods. I know everything about how long a tin of stewed tomatoes can last at fifty degrees Celsius.”
Carl tried to smile. “And then you couldn’t keep out of politics, and you ended up with the wrong name. Is that it?”
“Yes, something like that.”
“And you were tortured?”
“Yes. Carl, I do not want to talk about that. You have not seen how I can get when I feel bad. I cannot talk about it, OK?”
“OK.” Carl nodded. “And from now on you’re going to tell me what you’re doing during work hours. Do you get me?”
Assad gave his boss a thumbs-up.
The expression in Carl’s eyes allowed Assad’s gaze to relax. Then he held up his hand for a high-five, and Assad smacked it.
So that was that.
“OK, Assad. Let’s move on. We’ve got other things to think about,” said Carl. “We need to locate this Lars Henrik Jensen. I’m hoping it won’t be long before we’ll be able to log on to the Civil Registration System, but until then, let’s try to find his mother, Ulla Jensen. A man out at Riso…” He saw that Assad wanted to ask him what Riso was, but that could wait. “A man told me that she lives south of Copenhagen.”
“Is Ulla Jensen an unusual name?”
Carl shook his head. “Now that we know the name of the father’s company, we have more angles we can check. To start off, I’m going to call the Registry of Companies. We can only hope that it hasn’t been shut down too. In the meantime, go through the address-finder directory and look for the name Ulla Jensen. Try Brondbyerne and then move south. Vallensb?k, maybe Glostrup, Tastrup, Greve-Kildebronde. Don’t search all the way to Koge, because that’s where the company was located before. Try north of there.”
Assad looked relieved. He was just about to go out the door but turned around to give Carl a hug. His beard stubble was like needles, and his aftershave was some cheap knock-off brand, but the sentiment was genuine.
Carl sat at his desk for a moment, letting the feeling wash over him after Assad had waltzed across the hall to his own office. It was almost like having his old team back.
The answer came from both sources at once. The Registry of Companies had been functioning without interruption throughout the computer crash, and it took only five seconds on the keyboard for them to identify HJ Industries. It was owned by Trabeka Holding, a German firm, and they’d be happy to look for more information if Carl was interested. They couldn’t see who the owners were, but that could be found out if they contacted their German colleagues. After they gave Carl the address, he shouted over to Assad that he could stop his search, but Assad shouted back that he’d already found a couple of possible addresses.
They compared results. There it was. Ulla Jensen lived on the site of the bankrupt HJ Industries, on Strohusvej in Greve.
Carl looked it up on the map. It was only a few hundred yards away from where Daniel Hale had burned to death on the Kappelev highway. He remembered standing there. It was the road he’d looked down as they’d surveyed the countryside.
He felt the adrenaline starting to pump faster. Now they had an address. And they could drive there in twenty minutes.
“Should we call down there first then, Carl?” Assad handed him the phone number.
He gave his helper a blank look. So it wasn’t always pearls of wisdom that fell from the man’s lips. “That’s a great idea, Assad, if we want to find an empty house.”
Originally it must have been an ordinary farm with a farmhouse, pigsty, and barn arranged around a cobblestone courtyard. The house was so close to the road that they could look right into the rooms. Behind the whitewashed buildings were three or four larger ones. A couple of them had presumably never been put to use. This seemed in any case true of a building thirty to forty feet high, with gaping holes where the windows should have been set in. It was incomprehensible that the authorities had ever allowed something like that to be built. It completely ruined the view down to the fields, where yellow carpets of rapeseed gave way to meadows so green that the color couldn’t possibly be reproduced in any painting.
Carl scanned the landscape but didn’t see a soul. Not near any of the buildings either. The farmyard seemed just as neglected as everything else. The whitewash on the house was flaking off. Piled up by the road, a little farther to the east, were heaps of junk and building debris. Aside from the dandelions and flowering fruit trees that towered over the corrugated Eternit roof, the whole place looked terribly bleak.
“There is no car in the courtyard, Carl,” said Assad. “Maybe it was a long time ago when somebody lived here.”
Carl clenched his teeth, trying to fend off his disappointment. His gut told him that Lars Henrik Jensen wasn’t here. Damn it. Damn it to hell.
“Let’s go in and look around, Assad,” he said as he parked the car fifty yards farther along the road.
They set off in silence. Through the hedge they reached the back of the house and a garden where fruit bushes and ground-elder were fighting for space. The bay windows of the house were gray with dirt and age. Everything seemed dead.
“Look at this,” whispered Assad, pressing his nose against one of the windowpanes.
Carl leaned in to look. The inside of the house seemed abandoned too. It was almost like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, except there were no banners or thorn bushes. Dust covered the tables, the books, and newspapers, and all sorts of papers. In one corner cardboard boxes were piled up that had never been unpacked, and there were carpets that were still rolled up.
Here was a family whose life had been interrupted during a happier time.
“I think they were in the process of moving in when the accident happened, Assad. That’s what the man at Riso said too.”
“Yes, but look over there in the back then.”
Assad pointed at a doorway on the other side of the room. Light was streaming in, and the floor behind was polished and shiny.
“You’re right,” Carl said. “It looks different.”
They made their way through an herb garden where the bumblebees buzzed around flowering chives and
