The Purity of Vengeance (2 page)

But he turned on the radio and filled the car with jangling remoteness, Sting accompanying them south across Sjælland, Sade and Madonna over Falster and the Guldborgsund strait to Lolland. Strange, young voices in the night. The only thing that bound them together.

Everything else was gone.

A few hundred meters before the village of Blans, still a couple of kilometers from the manor farm, he pulled in to the edge of the fields.

“Now tell me,” he said, his gaze fastened to the darkness outside. His words were without warmth. He didn’t even utter her name by way of comfort. All he had was
Tell me
!

She closed her eyes. Pleaded with him to understand there were underlying events that explained everything, and that the man who had confronted her was the very cause of her misfortune.

But apart from that, what he had said had been the truth. She admitted it, her voice a whisper.

It was true. All of it.

For an agonizing, all-consuming moment only his breathing was heard. Then he turned toward her with darkness in his eyes. “So that’s why we’ve never been able to have children,” he said.

She nodded. Pressed her lips together and told it like it was. Yes, she was guilty of lies and deceit. She came clean. As a young girl she had been committed to Sprogø, through no fault of her own. A chain of misunderstandings, abuse of power, betrayal. There was no other reason. And yes, she’d had abortions and had been sterilized, but the dreadful man they had just encountered . . .

He laid his hand on her arm, and its coldness went through her like an electric shock, prompting her to stop.

Then he put the car into gear, released the clutch, and drove slowly through the village before accelerating quickly past the meadows and the darkened view of the water.

“I’m sorry, Nete. But I can’t forgive your allowing me to live all these years blindly believing we could become parents together. I simply can’t. And as for the rest of what you’ve told me, quite frankly I’m disgusted.”

He paused, and she felt an icy tingle at her temples, the muscles of her neck tensing.

He raised his head. Arrogantly, the way he did when negotiating with people he deemed unworthy of his respect. Confidently, as when ignoring poor advice.

“I shall pack some things,” he said firmly. “In the meantime, you have a week to make other arrangements. Take whatever you need from Havngaard. You won’t be left wanting.”

She turned her face slowly away from him and stared out over the sea. Rolled the window down slightly and drew in the smell of seaweed borne by waves as black as ink, waves that might take her once and for all.

And the feeling returned to her of lonely, desperate days on Sprogø, when the same lapping sea had tried to lure her into putting an end to her miserable life.

“You won’t be left wanting,” he had said, as though it mattered.

He knew nothing about her.

She glanced at her watch and fixed the date in her mind, the fourteenth of November 1985, and felt her lips quiver as she turned to look at him.

His dark eyes were cavities in his face. Only the bends in the road ahead claimed his interest.

She lifted one hand slowly and grasped the steering wheel, wrenching it to the right as hard as she could just as he opened his mouth in protest.

The engine roared in vain as the road vanished beneath them, and as they hurtled through the windbreak the sound of rasping metal drowned out her husband’s final protests.

When they hit the sea, it was almost like coming home.

1

November 2010

Carl had heard about
the night’s incident over the police radio on his way in from his house in Allerød. Under normal circumstances nothing could interest him less than vice cases, but somehow this felt different.

The owner of an escort service had been attacked with sulfuric acid in her flat on Enghavevej, leaving staff of the Rigshospital’s burns unit with a job on their hands.

Now a call had gone out for witnesses, as yet without any luck.

A band of dodgy-looking Lithuanians had already been brought in for questioning, but as the night hours passed it had become clear that only one of the suspects could possibly be the perpetrator, and it was unlikely they would find out who. There was no evidence. On her admission to the hospital the victim had declared she would be unable to identify her assailant, and now they were going to have to let the whole lot of them go.

Hadn’t he heard this before?

On his way through the courtyard of Police HQ he ran into Halmtorvet’s Icicle, aka Brandur Isaksen from Station City, who was heading for the parking area.

“Off to make life difficult for someone, I hope?” Carl grunted in passing, whereupon the brainless oaf stopped as if it had been an invitation.

“It’s Bak’s sister this time,” Isaksen said coldly.

Carl stared at him with bleary eyes. What the fuck was he talking about? “Tough shit,” he replied. It was an all-purpose response adequate for most situations.

“You’ve heard about that acid attack over on Enghavevej, I take it? Not a pretty sight, I can tell you,” Isaksen went on. “The doctors have been working on her all night. You know Børge Bak pretty well, don’t you?”

Carl tossed his head back. Børge Bak? Of course he knew Børge Bak. The inspector from Department A who had applied for leave, then opted for early retirement. That sanctimonious git?

“We’re about as much friends as you and I are,” Carl blurted out.

Isaksen nodded, his teeth clenched. It was true: if there was any fondness at all between them it would fall apart at the flutter of a pair of butterfly wings.

“What about Børge’s sister, Esther? You wouldn’t know her, I suppose?” he asked.

Carl stared over at the colonnade along which Rose was now tripping with a handbag the size of a suitcase draped over her shoulder. What the hell was she planning to do, spend her holidays at the office?

He sensed Isaksen follow his gaze and tore himself away.

“Never met the woman. Doesn’t she run a brothel?” Carl replied. “Anyway, that’d be more your domain, so keep me out of it, if you don’t mind.”

The corners of Isaksen’s mouth succumbed to gravity. “You might as well be prepared. Bak’ll be here before you know it, sticking his oar in.”

Carl doubted it. Hadn’t Bak chucked it all in because he hated his job and loathed Police HQ?

“He’ll be welcome,” he answered. “As long as he stays away from me.”

Isaksen dragged his fingers through his early-morning tousle of jet-black hair. “Yeah, well, you’ve got enough on your plate shagging her, haven’t you?”

He nodded in the direction of Rose as she vanished up the steps.

Carl shook his head and carried on walking. Isaksen could take a running jump with all his crap. Shagging Rose! He’d rather join a monastery in Bratislava.

“Just a minute, Carl,” said the duty officer as he passed the cage half a minute later. “That psychologist woman, Mona Ibsen, left this for you.” He thrust a gray envelope at Carl through the open door as though it were the highlight of his day.

Carl stared at it, nonplussed. Maybe it was.

The duty officer sat down again. “Assad was here at four this morning, so I heard. He sees to it he has plenty of time on his own, I’ll say that for him. What’s he up to down there, anyway? Planning a terrorist strike?” He chortled to himself for a moment, then thought better of it when he saw Carl’s piercing gaze.

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Carl said, recalling the case of the woman who had been arrested in the airport for merely uttering the word “bomb,” a slip-up of front-page dimensions.

To his mind, what he’d just heard was a lot bloody worse.

 • • • 

Even from the bottom step of the rotunda stairwell he could tell this was one of Rose’s better days. A heavy scent of cloves and jasmine assaulted his nostrils, reminding him of the old woman back in Øster Brønderslev who used to pinch the backsides of all the men who came to visit her. When Rose smelled like this, it gave him a headache, besides the one he always got on account of her usual grouching.

Assad’s theory was that she’d inherited the perfume, while others reckoned this kind of putrefying blend was still available in certain Indian shops that couldn’t care less if they ever saw another customer again.

“Hey, Carl, come here a minute, would you?” she bellowed from inside her office.

Carl gave a sigh. What now?

He walked stiffly past Assad’s shambles of a cubbyhole, poked his nose into Rose’s clinically disinfected domain, and immediately noticed the voluminous shoulder bag she’d just been toting. As far as Carl could tell, Rose’s perfume wasn’t the only disconcerting aspect of the day. The enormous wad of documents peeping out of her bag seemed just as disheartening.

“Erm,” he ventured cautiously, indicating the reams of paper. “What’s all that, then?”

She glared at him with kohl-rimmed eyes. It did not bode well.

“Some old cases that have been lying around various commissioners’ offices this past year. Cases that should have been handed on to us.
You
of all people would know about that kind of slovenliness.”

To the latter suggestion she added a kind of guttural growl that might have passed as a laugh.

“The folders here had been sent over to the National Investigation Center by mistake. I’ve just been to pick them up.”

Carl raised his eyebrows. More work, so why the hell was she smiling?

“OK, I know what you’re thinking: bad news of the day,” Rose said, beating him to it. “But you haven’t seen this yet. This one’s not from the NIC, it was already on my chair when I came in.”

She handed him a battered cardboard folder. She looked as if she expected him to flick through it on the spot, but on that count she had another thing coming. For Carl, bad news wasn’t an option before a man’s first smoke of the morning. There was a time and a place for everything, and he’d only just got here, for Chrissake.

He shook his head and wandered off into his own office, tossing the folder onto his desk and his coat over the chair in the corner.

The room smelled musty and the fluorescent light on the ceiling flickered even more frantically than usual. Wednesdays were always the worst.

He lit a smoke and trudged across the corridor to Assad’s little broom cupboard, where everything seemed to be as usual: prayer mat rolled out on the floor; dense, myrtle-laced clouds of steam; transistor tuned in to something that sounded like the mating cries of dolphins interspersed with a gospel choir, played on an open-reel tape recorder with a dodgy drive belt.

Istanbul à la carte.

“Morning,” Carl grunted.

Assad turned his head slowly toward him. A sunrise over Kuwait could not have been ruddier than the poor man’s impressive proboscis.

“Jesus, Assad, that doesn’t look too good,” he exclaimed, retreating a step at the sight. If the flu was thinking of rampaging through the halls of Police HQ, he could only hope it would give him a wide berth.

“It came on yesterday,” Assad sniffled. His runny eyes looked like a puppy’s.

“Off home with you, on the double,” Carl said, withdrawing even farther. No point in saying any more, given that Assad wasn’t going to take any notice.

He went back to his safety zone and slung his legs up on the desk, wondering for the first time in his life whether it might be time to take a package holiday in the Canary Islands. Two weeks under an umbrella with a scantily clad Mona at his side wouldn’t be half bad. The flu could cause as much havoc in Copenhagen as it liked while they were away.

He smiled at the thought, took out the little envelope from Mona, and opened it. The scent alone was almost enough. Delicate and sensual. Mona Ibsen in a nutshell. A far cry from Rose’s dense, daily bombardment of his olfactory system.

My darling
, it began.

Carl melted. Not since he’d lain incapacitated on a ward of Brønderslev Hospital with six stitches in his side and his appendix in a jar had he been addressed so with such affection.

My darling,

See you at my place at seven thirty for Martinmas goose, OK? Put a jacket on and bring the wine. I’ll do the surprises.

Kisses, Mona

He felt the warmth rise in his cheeks. What a woman!

He closed his eyes, took a deep drag of his cigarette, and conjured up images to accompany the word “surprises.” Not all of them would be deemed suitable for a family audience.

“What are you doing with your eyes closed and that big grin on your face?” came a harping voice from behind him. “Aren’t you going to have a look in that case folder I gave you?”

Rose stood in the doorway with her arms folded and her head cocked to one side. It meant she was going nowhere until he did as she said.

Carl stubbed out his smoke and reached for the folder. Might as well get it over with or else she’d be standing there till she’d tied knots in her arms.

The folder contained ten faded sheets of paper from Hjørring District Court. He could see what it was at a glance.

How the hell did it wind up on Rose’s chair?

He skimmed the first page, already knowing what he was about to read. Summer 1978. Man drowned in the Nørreå river. Owner of a large machine works, passionate angler, and a member of various clubs, accordingly. Four sets of fresh footprints around his stool and creel. None of his fishing tackle missing. Abu reel and rods at more than five hundred kroner apiece. Weather fine. Autopsy revealing nothing abnormal, no heart disease, no coronary thrombosis. Just drowned.

Had it not been for the river being only seventy-five centimeters deep at the spot in question, it would all have been written off as an accident.

But it wasn’t the man’s death in itself that had awakened Rose’s interest; that much Carl knew. Nor was it the fact that the case had never been solved and hence now resided in the basement of Department Q. No, it was because attached to the case documents were a number of photographs, and Carl’s mug appeared on two of them.