“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 over at the tongs, but the tips had been blunted from digging her message into the concrete floor.
“Ohhh,” she whispered. “Just one more day and I would have been ready.” Then she wiped the sweat from her brow and held her wrist up to her lips. Maybe she could bite through the artery, if she got a good grip. She nibbled a little at her flesh, but her teeth couldn’t hold fast. Then she turned her wrist around and tried to use her incisors, but her arm had grown too thin and fleshless. Her wrist bone was in the way, and her teeth weren’t sharp enough.
“What’s she doing in there?” the witch yelled in a shrill voice, pressing her face against the pane. Her eyes were wide open, the only thing visible while the rest of her was in shadow, with the blinding floodlights as a backdrop.
“Open the airlock all the way. Do it
Merete looked over at the flashlight that lay ready next to the hole she’d dug under the bolt of the airlock door. She dropped the stiffener and crawled on all fours to the airlock while the woman jeered at her. Everything inside Merete wept and pleaded for life.
Through the loudspeaker system she could hear the man rattling the airlock door as she grabbed the flashlight and shoved it down into the hole in the floor.
There was a clicking sound and then the turning mechanism started moving as she stared at the airlock door, her heart pounding. If the flashlight and the bolt didn’t hold, she was lost. The pressure inside of her body would be released like a grenade; that was how she pictured it.
“Oh, dear God, dear God, don’t let that happen,” she sobbed and crawled back to get the stiffener as the bolt began banging against the flashlight. She turned to watch and saw the flashlight rock slightly back and forth. Then she heard a sound she’d never heard before. Like a camera’s telephoto lens being activated, the hum of a mechanism being precisely released, followed by a quick thump against the airlock door. So now the outer door was open. All the pressure was on the inner door, and the flashlight was the only thing between her and the most horrifying death she could imagine. But the flashlight wasn’t moving anymore. The door perhaps had opened a hundredth of a millimeter, because the hissing sound of air forcing its way out of the chamber grew louder until it was like a shrieking whistle.
She felt it in her body after a few seconds. Suddenly her pulse was beating in her ears and she noticed a slight pressure in her sinuses as if a cold were settling in her head.
“She blocked the door, Mother!” shouted the man.
“So turn it off and try again, you idiot,” the woman snarled.
For a moment the wailing tone fell in pitch. Then she heard the mechanism start up, and again the sound grew louder.
They tried several times in vain to make the inner airlock door function properly as Merete kept filing the nylon stiffener.
“We need to kill her now and get her out of here. Do you understand?” shouted the she-devil outside. “Run and get the sledgehammer. It’s behind the house.”
Merete stared up at the glass panes. For the last couple of years they had served both as her prison bars and
