“You neglected to include the fact that a social worker named Karin Mortensen observed Uffe Lynggaard playing a game that indicated he remembered the car accident. Maybe he also remembers something from the day when Merete disappeared. But apparently you didn’t pursue that angle very far.”
“Karen Mortensen. Karen spelled with an e, not an i, Carl. Try listening to yourself. And don’t come here trying to teach me anything about being thorough.”
“Does that mean you realize how significant this piece of information from Karen Mortensen could be?”
“Shut the fuck up. We checked it out, okay? Uffe didn’t remember shit about anything. That kid’s got nothing upstairs.”
“Merete Lynggaard met a man a few days before she died. He was part of a delegation on research into the workings of the immune system. You didn’t put anything about that in your report either.”
“No, but we looked into it.”
“So then you must know that a man got in touch with her, and there was clearly strong chemistry between them. That’s what her secretary, Søs Norup, says she told you, at any rate.”
“Yes, damn it. Of course I know that.”
“Then why isn’t it in your report?”
“I don’t know. Probably because it turned out that the man was dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yes, burned to death in a car accident the day after Merete disappeared. His name was Daniel Hale.” He enunciated the name carefully, so that Carl would take note of what a good memory he had.
“Daniel Hale?” Apparently Søs had forgotten his name over the years.
“Yes, he was working on the placenta research that the delegation was trying to get funded. He had a laboratory in Slangerup.” Bak presented these facts with supreme self-confidence. He had a good handle on this part of the case.
“If he didn’t die until the following day, he still could have had something to do with Merete’s disappearance.”
“I don’t think so. He came home from London on the afternoon she drowned.”
“Was he in love with her? Søs hinted that might be the case.”
“If so, I feel sorry for the man. She wasn’t having any of it.”
“Are you sure, Børge?” His colleague clearly wasn’t comfortable hearing Carl use his first name. So that settled things — he was going to hear it nonstop. “Maybe it was this Daniel Hale she had dinner with at Bankeråt. What do you think, Børge?”
“Listen, Carl. There’s a woman in the cyclist murder case who’s talked to us, and now we’re hot on the trail. I’m busy as fuck right now. Can’t this wait until some other time? Daniel Hale is dead. He wasn’t even in the country when Merete Lynggaard died. She drowned, and Hale didn’t have shit to do with it, OK?”
“Did you try to find out whether Hale was the person she had dinner with at Bankeråt a week earlier? There’s nothing about it in the report.”
“Listen to me! The investigation finally pointed to the likelihood that her death was an accident. Besides, there were twenty of us on the case. Go ask somebody else. Now, get out of here, Carl.”
If he relied exclusively on his sense of smell and hearing, it was hard to distinguish the basement in police headquarters from Cairo’s teeming alleyways on Monday morning when Carl arrived at work. Never before had that venerable building ever reeked so much of cooking smells and exotic spices, and never before had those walls heard the likes of such twisted tones.
A secretary from Admin who had just been down to the archives glared at Carl as she passed him, her arms filled with case files. Her expression said that in ten minutes the whole building was going to know that everything had run amok down in the basement.
The explanation was to be found in Assad’s pygmy office, where a sea of baked goods and pieces of foil holding chopped garlic, little green bits, and yellow rice adorned the plates on his desk. No wonder it was causing raised eyebrows.
“What’s going on here, Assad?” shouted Carl, turning off the cassette player. Assad merely smiled. Evidently he wasn’t aware of the cultural gap that was presently in the process of gnawing its way deep under the solid foundations of police headquarters.
Carl dropped heavily onto the chair across from his assistant. “It smells wonderful, Assad, but this is the police department. Not a Lebanese takeaway in Vanløse.”
“Here, Carl. And congratulations, Mr. Superintendent, one might say,” replied Assad, handing him a buttery dough triangle. “This is from my wife. My daughters cut out the paper.”
Carl followed Assad’s hand as he gestured around the room. Now he noticed the brilliantly colored tissue paper draped over the bookshelves and ceiling lights.
This was not going to be easy.
“I also took some to Hardy yesterday. I have read most of the case files to him out loud now, Carl.”
“Is that right?” He could just picture the nurses as Assad fed Egyptian rolls to Hardy. “You mean you went to see him on your day off?”
“He is thinking about the case, Carl. A fine man. He is a fine man.”
Carl nodded and took a bite. He planned to go and see Hardy tomorrow.
“I have put together all the papers about the car accident on your desk, Carl. If you like I can also talk a little about what I have been reading.”
Carl nodded again. Before he knew it, his assistant would be writing the report before they were even done with the case.
In other parts of Denmark on Christmas Eve in 1986, the temperature was up to six degrees Celsius, but on Sjælland they weren’t as lucky, and it had cost ten people their lives. Five of them died on a narrow country road that ran through a wooded area in the Tibirke Hills; two of them were the parents of Merete and Uffe Lynggaard.
They had tried to pass a Ford Sierra on a stretch of road where the wind had created a carpet of ice crystals, and that’s where things went terribly wrong. No one was assigned blame, and no lawsuits were filed for damages. It was a simple accident, except that the outcome was anything but simple.
The car they tried to pass ended up in a tree and was still burning when the fire department arrived, while the car belonging to Merete’s parents lay upside down fifty yards farther away. Merete’s mother was thrown through the windshield and landed in the thickets, her neck broken. Her father was not as lucky. It took him ten minutes to die. Half of the engine block had punctured his abdomen and a tree branch had pierced his ribcage. It was assumed that Uffe remained conscious the whole time, because when the firemen cut him out of the car, he watched their efforts with wide-open, frightened eyes. He refused to let go of his sister’s hand, even when they pulled her out on to the road to give her first aid. He never let go, even for a second.
The police report was simple and brief, but the newspaper reports were not. It was too good a story.
In the other car, a little girl and her father died instantly. The circumstances were especially tragic because only the older boy escaped relatively unharmed. The mother was in the last stages of pregnancy, and the family had been on its way to the hospital. While the firemen tried to put out the blaze under the hood of the car, the mother gave birth to twins with her head resting on the body of her dead husband and one leg pinned beneath the car seat. In spite of heroic efforts to cut all of them out of the car in time, one of the babies died, and the newspapers had a guaranteed front-page story for Christmas Day.
Assad showed Carl both the local rags and the national papers, and all of them had picked up on the newsworthiness of the story. The photographs were heart-rending. The car in the tree and the torn-up road; the new mother on her way in the ambulance with a sobbing boy at her side; Merete Lynggaard lying on a stretcher in the middle of the road with an oxygen mask over her face; and Uffe, who was sitting on the thin layer of snow with frightened eyes, firmly gripping the hand of his unconscious sister.
“Here,” said Assad, taking two pages from the Gossip tabloid out of the case file, which he’d taken from Carl’s desk. “Lis found out that some of these pictures were also used in the newspapers when Merete Lynggaard was elected to the Folketing,” Assad added.
All in all, the photographer who just happened to be in the Tibirke Woods on that particular afternoon had certainly got his money’s worth out of the few hundredths of a second it took to snap those pictures. He was also the one who had photographed the funeral of Merete’s parents — this time in color. Sharp, well-composed press shots of a teenage Merete Lynggaard holding her stunned brother by the hand as the urns were interred in Vestre Cemetery. There were no photographs from the other funeral. It took place in the utmost privacy.
“What the hell is going on down here?” a voice broke in. “Is it your fault that it stinks like Christmas Eve upstairs in our office?”
Sigurd Harms, one of the police sergeants from the second floor, was standing in the doorway. He stared with astonishment at the orgy of colors hanging from the lights.
“Here, Sigurd Fart-Nose,” said Carl, handing him one of the spicy, buttery rolls. “Just wait until Easter. That’s when we burn incense too.”
A message was delivered from upstairs saying that the homicide chief wanted to see Carl in his office before lunch. Jacobsen wore a gloomy and preoccupied expression as he looked up from reading the documents in front of him and invited Carl to have a seat.
Carl was about to apologize for Assad and explain that all that deepfrying wouldn’t happen again in the basement; he had the situation under control. But he never got that far before a pair of new detectives came in and sat down against the wall.