Mercy (33 page)

Yes, everything had been carefully planned. If the papers hadn’t burned up in the car, Lasse would probably have made sure they disappeared before the police and ambulances arrived. Carl noted the date and time of the proposed meeting. It all fitted together. Hale had been lured to his death. Dennis Knudsen was waiting for him on the Kappelev highway with his foot on the accelerator.

‘Look at this, Carl,’ said Assad, picking up the paper on top of the next pile. It was an article from the
Fredriksborg Amts
newspaper that mentioned Dennis Knudsen’s death at the bottom of the page. ‘Death a Result of Drug Abuse’ was the curt headline.

The perfect ‘cause-of-death’ category to be filed under.

Carl looked at the next pages in the pile. There was no doubt that Lasse had offered Dennis a lot of money to cause the car accident. Nor was there any doubt that it was Lasse’s brother, Hans, who had stepped out in front of Hale’s car, forcing him to veer into the middle of the road. Everything went as planned, except for the fact that Lasse never paid Dennis, as he’d promised, and Dennis got mad.

A surprisingly well-formulated letter from Dennis Knudsen to Lasse presented an ultimatum: either he paid the three hundred thousand kroner or Dennis would obliterate him somewhere out on some road or highway when he least expected it.

Carl thought about Dennis’s sister. What a lovely kid brother she was mourning.

He looked up at the bulletin boards and got an overview of the devastating events in the course of Lasse Jensen’s life. The car accident, the rebuff from the insurance company. A request for funding from the Lynggaard Foundation denied. The motives accumulated and became much clearer than before.

‘Do you think he went good and crazy in the head from all this?’ asked Assad, handing something to Carl.

Carl frowned. ‘I don’t dare think about it, Assad.’

He looked closely at the object that Assad had given him. It was a small, compact Nokia mobile phone. Red and new and shiny. On the back someone had printed in tiny, crooked letters: ‘Sanne Jønsson’ under a little heart. He wondered what the girl would say when she found out her mobile still existed.

‘We’ve got everything here,’ he said to Assad, nodding at the photos on the wall of Lasse’s mother sitting in a hospital bed, weeping, of the Godhavn buildings and of a man with the words ‘foster-father Satan’ written underneath in thick letters. Old newspaper clippings praising HJ Industries and Lasse Jensen’s father for his exceptional pioneering work in the field of high-tech Danish industry. There were at least twenty detailed photos taken on board the
Schleswig-Holstein
, along with sailing schedules and measurements of the distance down to the car deck, as well as the number of steps. There was also a time schedule in two columns. One for Lasse, and one for his brother. So both of them had been involved.

‘What does this mean?’ asked Assad, pointing at the numbers.

Carl wasn’t sure.

‘It could mean that they kidnapped her and killed her somewhere. I’m afraid that might be the explanation.’

‘And what does this mean then?’ Assad went on, pointing at the last steel table, on top of which were several ring binders and a series of technical cross-section diagrams.

Carl picked up the first ring binder. There were section dividers inside, and the first one was labelled ‘Handbook for Diving – The Naval Weapons Academy AUG 1985’. He leafed through the pages, reading the headers: diving physiology, valve maintenance, surface decompression tables, oxygen handling tables, Boyle’s law, Dalton’s law.

It was pure gibberish to Carl.

‘Does a first mate need to know about diving then, Carl?’ asked Assad.

Carl shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s just a hobby of his.’

He went through the pile of papers and found a meticulous, handwritten draft for a manual. It was titled ‘Instructions for the pressure testing of containments, by Henrik Jensen, HJ Industries, 10 November 1986.’

‘Can you read that, Carl?’ asked Assad, who apparently couldn’t, his eyes glued to the text.

Several diagrams had been drawn 0n the first page along with surveys of pipe lead-ins. Apparently they had to do with specifications for changes in an existing installation, presumably the one that HJ Industries had taken over from InterLab when the buildings were purchased.

Carl did his best to skim through the handwritten pages, stopping at the words ‘pressure chamber’ and ‘enclosure’.

He raised his head and looked at a close-up photo of Merete Lynggaard that hung above the stack of papers. Once move the words ‘pressure chamber’ thundered through his mind.

The thought sent shivers down his back. Could it really be true? It was a gruesome, horrifying thought. Horrifying enough to get the sweat trickling.

‘What is wrong, Carl?’ asked Assad.

‘Go outside and keep watch on the place. Do it
now
, Assad.’

His partner was about to repeat his question when Carl turned to look at the last pile of papers. ‘Go now, Assad. And be careful. Take this with you.’ He handed Assad the iron bar that they’d used to prise open the lock.

He paged quickly through the papers. There were lots of mathematical calculations, mostly written by Henrik Jensen, and also by others. But he found nothing related to what he was looking for.

Again he studied the knife-sharp photo of Merete Lynggaard. It had presumably been taken at close range, but she probably hadn’t noticed, since her attention was directed slightly to the side. There was a particular look in her eyes. Something vital and alert that couldn’t help affecting the viewer. But Carl was certain that wasn’t why Lasse Jensen had hung up this photo in particular. On the contrary. There were lots of holes around its edges. Presumably it had been taken down and put up again, time after time.

One by one Carl pulled out the four pins that held the picture. Then he lifted it off and turned it over.

What was written on the back was the work of a madman.

He read it several times.

These disgusting eyes will pop out of your head. Your ridiculous smile will be drowned in blood. Your hair will shrivel up, and your thoughts will be pulverized. Your teeth will rot. Nobody will remember you for anything other than what you are: a whore, a bitch, a devil, a fucking murderer. Die like that, Merete Lynggaard.

And underneath had been added in block letters:

6/July/2002: 2 ATMOSPHERES

6/July/2003: 3 ATMOSPHERES

6/July/2004: 4 ATMOSPHERES

6/July/2005: 5 ATMOSPHERES

6/July/2006: 6 ATMOSPHERES

15/July/2007: 1 ATMOSPHERE

Carl glanced over his shoulder. It felt as if the walls were closing in around him. He put his hand to his forehead and stood there, thinking hard. They had her here, he was sure of it. She was somewhere close by. It said here they were going to kill her in five weeks, on May 15th, but it was likely they’d already done so. He had a feeling that he and Assad might have provoked the deed, and it had definitely happened somewhere near by.

What do I do? Who would know something? Carl wondered, as he dug through his memory.

He grabbed his mobile and punched in the number of Kurt Hansen, his former colleague who’d ended up as an MP of the Conservative Party.

He paced the room as he listened to the phone ring. Father Time was out there somewhere, laughing at all of them, he could feel it so clearly now.

A second before he was going to put the phone down, he heard Kurt Hansen’s distinctive throat-clearing, then his voice.

Carl told him not to speak, just listen and think fast. No questions, just answers.

‘You want to know what would happen to a person who was subjected to up to six atmospheres of pressure over a period of five years and then the pressure was released all at once?’ Kurt repeated. ‘That’s a strange question. This is a hypothetical situation, right?’

‘Just answer me, Kurt. You’re the only one I can think of who knows about these things. I don’t know anybody else who has a professional diving certificate, so tell me what would happen.’

‘Well, the person would die, of course.’

‘Yes, but how fast?’

‘I have no idea, but it would be a horrible affair.’

‘In what way?’

‘Everything would explode from the inside. The alveoli would burst the lungs. The nitrogen in the bones would shred the tissue. The organs, and everything in the body would expand because there’s oxygen everywhere. Blood clots, cerebral haemorrhages, massive bleeding, even –’

Carl stopped him. ‘Who could help somebody in this situation?’

Kurt Hansen again cleared his throat. Maybe he didn’t know the answer. ‘Is this an actual situation, Carl?’ he asked.

‘I’m seriously afraid that it is, yes.’

‘Then you need to call the naval station at Holmen. They have a mobile decompression chamber. A Duocom from Dräger.’ He gave Carl the number. Carl thanked him and ended the call.

It took only a moment to explain the situation to the naval officer on duty.

‘You’ve got to hurry. This is incredibly urgent,’ said Carl. ‘Bring people with pneumatic drills and other equipment, because I don’t know what kind of obstacles you’re going to encounter. And notify police headquarters. I need reinforcements.’

‘I think I understand the situation,’ said the voice on the phone.

39

The same day

They approached the last of the buildings with the greatest of caution. They studied the ground carefully to see if any digging had been done recently. They stared at the slippery plastic drums lined up along the wall, as if they might contain a bomb.

This door also had a padlock that Assad broke open with the iron bar – a skill that would soon have to be added to his job description.

They noticed a sweet smell in the hall’s entrance. Like a mixture of the cologne from Lasse Jensen’s bedroom and the smell of meat that had been left out too long. Or maybe more like the scent of the animal cages at the zoo on a warm, blossoming, spring day.

Lying on the floor were scores of receptacles made from in shiny stainless steel in different lengths. Most of them did not yet have gauges affixed to them, but a few of them did. Endless shelves along one wall indicated that production had been planned on a large scale. But that had never happened.

Carl gestured for Assad to follow him over to the next door, holding his index finger to his lips. Assad nodded and gripped the iron bar so hard that his knuckles turned white. He crouched down a bit, as if to make himself a smaller target. He seemed to do so reflexively.

Carl opened the next door.

There was light in the room. Lamps in reinforced glass fixtures lit up a hallway. On one side, doors opened on to a series of windowless offices; on the other side a door led to yet another corridor. Carl gestured for Assad to search the offices while he started down the long, narrow hallway.

It was unspeakably filthy, as if over time shit or some kind of muck had been smeared on the walls and floor. Very unlike the spirit in which the factory’s founder, Henrik Jensen, had wanted to create these surroundings. Carl had a very hard time picturing white-clad engineers in this setting.

At the end of the corridor was a door, which Carl cautiously opened as he clutched the switchblade in his jacket pocket.

He turned on the light and saw what had to be a storage room containing a couple of carts and stacks of plasterboard as well as numerous cylinders of hydrogen and oxygen. He instinctively sniffed at the air. It smelled of cordite. As if a gun had been fired in the room quite recently.

‘Nothing in any of the offices,’ he heard Assad say quietly behind him.

Carl nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything here, either. Except for the same impression of filth as he’d had in the corridor.

Assad came inside and looked around.

‘He is not here then, Carl.’

‘It’s not him we’re looking for right now.’

Assad frowned. ‘Then who is it?’

‘Shhh,’ said Carl. ‘Do you hear that?’

‘What?’

‘Listen. It’s a very faint whistling sound.’

‘Whistling?’

Carl raised his hand to make Assad stop talking and then closed his eyes. It could be a ventilator in the distance. It could be water running through the pipes.

‘It is some air saying like that, Carl. Like something that is punctured.’

‘Yes, but where is it coming from?’ Carl slowly turned around. It was impossible to pinpoint. The room was no more than ten feet wide and fifteen to twenty feet long, but still the sound seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

He took a mental snapshot of the room. To his left were four pieces of plasterboard, standing up next to each other in layers that were perhaps five boards deep. Against the far wall was a single piece of plasterboard that leaned crookedly. The wall to his right was bare.

He looked up at the ceiling and saw four panels with tiny holes and in between them bundles of wires and copper pipes leading from the corridor and over behind the piles of plasterboard.

Assad saw it too. ‘There must be something behind the boards then, Carl.’

He nodded. Maybe an outside wall, maybe something else.

With every piece of plasterboard they grabbed and carried over to the opposite wall, the sound seemed to come closer.

Finally they were standing before a wall with a big black box up near the ceiling upon which was mounted a number of switches, gauges and buttons. To the side of this control panel an arched door had been set into the wall in two sections that were covered with metal plates. To the other side were two big portholes with armoured, completely milk-white panes. Wires were taped to the glass between a couple of pins that Carl guessed might be detonators. A surveillance camera on a tripod had been set up under each porthole. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the cameras had been used for and what the detonators were meant to do.

On the floor under the cameras were several little black pellets. He picked some up and saw that they were buckshot. He felt the glass panes and took a step back. There was no question that shots had been fired at them. So maybe there was something going on here that the people on the farm were unable to control.

He pressed his ear against the wall. The whining sound was coming from somewhere inside. Not from the door, not from the windows. Just from inside. It had to be an extremely high-pitched sound for it to penetrate such a solid enclosure.

‘It reads more than four bars, Carl.’

He looked at the pressure gauge that Assad was tapping on. He was right. And four bars was the same as five atmospheres. So the pressure inside the room had already dropped by one atmosphere.

‘Assad, I think Merete Lynggaard is inside there.’

His partner stood very still, studying the arched metal door. ‘You think so?’

He nodded.

‘The pressure is going in a downward direction, Carl.’

He was right. The needle’s movement was actually visible.

Carl looked up at all the cables overhead. The thin wires between the detonators dangled to the floor with stripped ends. The plan must have been to fasten a battery or some other explosive device to the wires. Was that what they were going to do on May 15th, when the pressure was supposed to drop to one atmosphere, as had been written on the back of the photo of Merete Lynggaard?

He looked around to try to make sense of it all. The copper pipes led directly into the room. There were maybe ten in all, so how could anyone tell which ones released the pressure and which ones increased it? If they cut through one of the pipes, there was a huge risk they would make matters worse for the person inside the pressure chamber. The same was true if they did anything to the electrical wires.

He stepped over to the airlock door and examined the relay boxes next to it. Here there was no question – everything was printed in black and white on the six buttons: Top door open. Top door closed. Outer airlock door open. Outer airlock door closed. Inner airlock door open. Inner airlock door closed.

And both airlock doors were in the closed position. That was how they would stay.

‘What do you think that thing’s for?’ asked Assad. He was perilously close to turning a little potentiometer from OFF to ON.

Carl wished that Hardy was here to see this. If there was one thing that Hardy could deal with better than anyone else, it was anything to do with buttons or dials.

‘That switch was then put in after all the others,’ said Assad. ‘Otherwise why are the others made of that brown stuff ?’ He pointed at a square box made of Bakelite. ‘And why should that one then be the only one made of plastic, out of all of them?’

It was true. The different types of switches had obviously been fabricated decades apart.

Assad nodded. ‘I think that dial might either stop the process, or else it does not mean anything.’ What an imprecise but beautiful way of putting it.

Carl took a deep breath. It was almost ten minutes since he’d spoken to the people out at Holmen, and it would still take them a while to arrive. If Merete Lynggaard was inside there, they were going to have to do something drastic.

‘Turn it,’ he told Assad with a sense of foreboding.

As soon as he did, they could hear the whistling sound slicing through the room at full force. Carl’s heart leaped to his throat. For a moment he was convinced that they’d released even more pressure.

Then he looked up and identified the four framed rectangles on the ceiling as loudspeakers. That was how they were able to hear the whistling sounds from inside the room, which had become piercingly enervating.

‘What is happening now?’ shouted Assad, holding his hands over his ears, making it hard for Carl to answer him.

‘I think you’ve turned on the intercom,’ he shouted back, turning to look up at the rectangles on the ceiling. ‘Are you inside there, Merete?’ he yelled three or four times and then listened intently.

Now he could clearly hear that the sound was air passing through a narrow passage. Like the noise a person makes with his teeth, just as he begins to whistle. And the sound was constant.

He cast a worried glance at the pressure gauge. Now it was almost down to four point five atmospheres. It was dropping fast.

He shouted again, this time at the top of his lungs, and Assad took his hands away from his ears and shouted too. Their combined yelling could wake the dead, thought Carl, sincerely hoping that things hadn’t gone that far.

Then he heard a loud thud from the black box up near the ceiling, and for a moment the room was totally silent.

That box up there controls the pressure equalization, he thought, considering whether to run into the other room and get something to stand on so he could open the box.

It was at that instant they heard groans coming from the loudspeakers. Like the sounds uttered by a cornered animal or a human being in deep crisis or grief. A long, monotonic moan of lament.

‘Merete, is that you?’ Carl shouted.

They stood still and waited. Then they heard a sound they interpreted as a yes.

Carl felt a burning in his throat. Merete Lynggaard was inside there. Imprisoned for over five years in this bleak and disgusting setting. And now she was possibly about to die, and Carl had no idea what to do.

‘What can we do, Merete?’ he yelled. At the same instant he heard an enormous bang from the plasterboard on the far wall. He knew at once that someone had fired a shotgun through the plasterboard from behind, scattering buckshot all over the room. He felt a throbbing several places in his body as warm blood began trickling out. He stood paralysed for a tenth of a second that felt like an eternity. Then he threw himself backwards against Assad, who was standing there with one arm bleeding and an expression that matched the situation.

As they lay on the floor, the plasterboard tipped forwards to reveal the person who had fired the shot. It wasn’t hard to recognize him. Aside from the lines on his face, which his hard life and tormented soul had produced over the years, Lasse Jensen looked exactly like the boy in the photos they’d seen.

He stepped out of his hiding place, holding the smoking shotgun, inspecting the wounds his shot had made with the same cool indifference as if it had been a flooded basement.

‘How did you find me?’ he asked, as he cracked the barrel and inserted more shells. He came over to them. There was no question that he would pull the trigger if he felt like it.

‘You can still stop this, Lasse,’ said Carl, propping himself up so that Assad could get out from under his body. ‘If you stop now, you might get off with a few years in prison. Otherwise it’s going to be a life sentence for murder.’

The man smiled. It wasn’t hard to see why women fell for him. He was a devil in disguise. ‘Then there’s a lot you don’t know,’ he said, aiming the gun straight at Assad’s temple.

Yeah, that’s what you think, thought Carl as he felt Assad’s hand feel its way inside his jacket pocket. ‘I’ve called for backup. My colleagues will be here any minute. Give me that shotgun, Lasse, and everything will be OK.’

Lasse shook his head. He didn’t believe it. ‘I’ll kill your partner if you don’t give me an answer. How the hell did you find me?’

Considering how much pressure he must be under, Lasse sounded far too controlled. He was obviously raving mad.

‘It was Uffe,’ Carl told him.

‘Uffe?’ Now the man’s expression changed. That piece of information just didn’t fit into the world he was determined to control. ‘Bullshit! Uffe Lynggaard doesn’t know a thing, ‘said Lasse He can’t even talk. I’ve been following the news the past couple of days. He didn’t say a word. You’re lying.’

Carl could feel that Assad had grabbed the switchblade.

To hell with regulations and laws about concealed weapons. He just hoped Assad would have time to use it.

A sound came from the loudspeakers overhead as if the woman in the room wanted to say something.

‘Uffe Lynggaard recognized you in a photograph,’ said Carl. ‘A photo of you and Dennis Knudsen standing next to each other as boys. Do you remember that picture, Atomos?’

The name stung him like a slap in the face. It was obvious that years of suffering were now surfacing inside Lasse Jensen.

He grimaced and nodded. ‘So you know about that too! I assume you know everything. Then you also realize that you’re going to have to accompany Merete.’

‘You won’t have time. Help is on the way,’ said Carl, leaning forwards a bit so that Assad could pull out the knife and lunge at the man in one movement. The question was whether the psychopath would be able to press the trigger in time. If Lasse fired both barrels simultaneously at such close range, he and Assad were done for.

Lasse smiled again. He had already regained his composure. It was the trademark of a psychopath: nothing could touch him.

‘Oh, I’ll have time. You can be sure of that.’

The jerk in Carl’s jacket pocket and the subsequent click of the switchblade coincided with the sound that flesh makes when you stick a knife into it. Sinews being severed, healthy muscles clipped. Carl saw the blood on Lasse’s leg just as Assad knocked the shotgun upwards with his bloodied left arm. The boom from the shotgun next to Carl’s ears when Lasse fired out of sheer reflex blocked out all other sounds. He saw Lasse silently topple over backwards, and then Assad threw himself at the man, his knife raised to strike.

‘No!’ yelled Carl, though he could barely hear the sound of his own voice. He tried to get up but now felt the full extent of the shot he’d taken. He looked down underneath himself and saw blood pouring out onto the floor. Then he grabbed his thigh and pressed hard as he stood up.