reached the other side of the house, down in one corner of the courtyard.
Carl moved close to the windows, which were fastened shut. Through the first panes he was able to get a glimpse of a room with bare walls and a couple of chairs. He pressed his forehead against the window and saw the room take shape. There was no doubt it was in use. A couple of shirts lay on the floor. The blankets on the box mattress had been pushed aside, and on top of them lay a pair of pajamas, a kind that he was certain he’d seen in a department store catalogue not long ago.
He concentrated on controlling his breathing and instinctively placed his hand on his belt, where he’d worn his service weapon for years. But it was months since he’d carried a gun.
“Someone slept in that bed recently,” he said quietly to Assad, who was looking through the windows a little farther away.
“Somebody was also here,” said Assad.
Carl went over and looked inside. Assad was right. The kitchen was neat and clean. Through a door in the wall directly across from them, they could see the dusty living room that they had looked into from the other side. It was like a mausoleum. A sacred place, not to be disturbed.
But the kitchen had definitely been in use quite recently.
“A deep freezer, coffee on the table, an electric kettle. There are also a couple of full bottles of cola over there in the corner,” said Carl.
He turned toward the pigsty and the other buildings behind it. They could continue their search without getting a court order, but they’d have to suffer the consequences afterward if it proved to be fruitless since they couldn’t very well claim that the opportunity would be lost if they searched the house at some other time. Actually, they could wait until morning. Yes, it might even be better to come back the next day. Maybe someone would be home by then.
He nodded. It was probably best to wait and follow proper legal procedures. He took a deep breath. In reality, he didn’t feel like doing either.
As Carl stood there thinking, Assad suddenly took off. For a man with such a compact, heavy body, he was surprisingly nimble. He crossed the yard in a couple of bounds and then went out into the road to wave down a farmer who was driving his tractor.
Carl went over to join them.
“Yes,” he heard the farmer say as he approached, the tractor idling. “The mother and son still live there. It’s a bit odd, but apparently she’s set up home in that building over there.” He pointed to the last of the adjacent buildings. “I think they must be in. At least, I saw her outside this morning.”
Carl showed the man his police badge, which prompted the farmer to turn off the tractor.
“What about the son?” said Carl. “Is his name Lars Henrik Jensen?”
The farmer squinted one eye to think. “Nay, I don’t think that’s his name. He’s a real strange, tall one. What the devil is his name?”
“So it’s not Lars Henrik?”
“No, that’s not it.”
See-saws and merry-go-rounds. Back and forth and up and down. Carl had been through this roller-coaster ride, countless times before. And he was sick and tired of it, among other things.
“You say they live in that building over there?” Carl pointed.
The farmer nodded, launching a blob of snot over the hood of his brand-new Ferguson tractor.
“How do they make a living?” asked Carl, gesturing at the open countryside.
“I don’t know. I lease a few acres from them. Kristoffersen, over there, leases some too. They’ve got some fallow land that’s subsidized, and she must also have a small pension. And a couple of times a week a van arrives from somewhere, bringing plastic items for them to clean, I think. It also brings them food. I think the woman and her son manage somehow.” He laughed. “This is farm country, you know. Out here we usually have everything we need.”
“An official van from the municipality?”
“No, it sure isn’t. It’s from some shipping company or something like that. It’s got a sign on the side that you sometimes see on ships on TV, but I don’t know where it’s from. All that stuff with oceans and seas has never interested me.”
After the farmer chugged off toward the windmill, Carl and Assad studied the buildings beyond the pigsty. Strange that they hadn’t noticed them from the road, because they were quite large. It was probably because the hedges had been planted so close together and had already sprouted leaves, thanks to the warm weather.
In addition to the three buildings surrounding the courtyard and the unfinished structure, there were three low buildings located close together next to a level area covered with gravel. Presumably at one time the plan had been to lay asphalt over there. By now weeds had sprung up everywhere, and the only gap in the greenery was a wide path connecting all the buildings.
Assad pointed at the narrow wheel tracks on the path. Carl had already noticed them. The width of a bicycle wheel, but parallel. Most likely from a wheelchair.
Carl’s cell phone rang, shrill and loud, just as they were approaching the building that the farmer had pointed 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
