“I don’t know. I had left by the time she came home.”
Assad nodded again. So that too was in the report.
Carl gave his assistant a professional look, which meant: It’s standard procedure to ask these types of questions multiple times. Let him chew on that for a while.
“I thought that Uffe couldn’t be left at home alone,” he then interjected.
“Oh yes, he could,” she replied, her eyes shining. “Just not late at night.”
At that point Carl wished he was back at his desk in the basement. He’d spent years having to drag information out of people, and by now his arms were feeling very tired. A couple more questions and then they had to be on their way. The Lynggaard case was obviously hopeless. She’d fallen overboard. Things like that happened.
“And it might have been too late if I hadn’t put the envelope where she’d find it,” said the woman.
He saw how her eyes shifted away for a moment. Not toward the little cupcakes. Away. “What do you mean?”
“Well, she died the next day, didn’t she?”
“That wasn’t what you were just thinking about, was it?”
“Of course.”
Seated next to Carl, Assad put his cake down on the table. Strangely enough, he’d also noticed her evasive maneuver.
“You were thinking about something else. I can tell. What did you mean, that it might have been too late?”
“Just what I said. That she died the next day.”
He looked up at the cake-happy host. “Would you mind if I spoke to Helle Andersen in private?”
The man didn’t look pleased, and Helle Andersen didn’t either. She smoothed out her smock, but the damage was done.
“Tell me, Helle,” Carl said, leaning toward her after the antique dealer had left the room. “If you know anything at all that you’ve been keeping to yourself, now is the time to tell me. Do you understand?”
“There wasn’t anything else.”
“Do you have children?”
The corners of her mouth drooped. What did that have to do with the case?
“OK. You opened the envelope, didn’t you?”
She jerked her head back in alarm. “Of course I didn’t.”
“This is perjury, Helle Andersen. Your children are going to have to do without you for a while.”
For a stout country girl, she reacted with extraordinary speed. Her hands flew up to her mouth, her feet shot under the sofa, her entire abdomen was sucked in as she tried to create a safe distance between herself and the dangerous police animal. “I didn’t open it.” The words flew out of her mouth. “I just held it up to the light.”
“What did the letter say?”
Her eyebrows practically overlapped. “All it said was: ‘Have a nice trip to Berlin.’”
“Do you know what she was going to do in Berlin?”
“It was just a fun trip with Uffe. They’d done it a couple of times before.”
“Why was it so important to wish her a nice trip?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who would have known about the trip, Helle? Merete lived a very private life with Uffe, as I understand it.”
She shrugged. “Maybe somebody at the Folketing. I don’t know.”
“Wouldn’t they just send her an e-mail?”
“I really don’t know.” She was obviously feeling pinned down. Maybe she was lying. Maybe she was just sensitive to pressure. “It might have been something from the council,” she ventured. It was another blind alley.
“So the letter said: ‘Have a nice trip to Berlin.’ Anything else?”
“Nothing else. Just that. Really.”
“No signature?”
“No. That was all.”
“And the messenger, what did he look like?”
She hid her face in her hands for a moment. “All I noticed was that he was wearing a really nice overcoat,” she said in a subdued voice.
“You didn’t see anything else? That can’t be right.”
“It’s true. He was taller than me, even though he was standing down on the step. And he was wearing a scarf. It was green. And it covered the lower half of his face. It was raining, so that was probably why. He also had a slight cold, or at least that’s how he sounded.”
“Did he sneeze?”
“No, he just sounded like he had a cold. Sniffled a bit, you know.”
“What about his eyes? Blue or brown?”
“I’m pretty sure they were blue. At least I think so. Maybe they were gray. But I’d recognize them, if I saw them again.”
“How old was he?”
“About my age, I think.”
As if that piece of information would help.