“Thank you for arranging this meeting for me, and for agreeing to see me again so soon.” He shook hands with Birger Larsen, adding, “This won’t take long.” He looked around at the familiar faces gathered in the Democrats’ vice-chairman’s office.
“All right, Mørck. I’ve invited all of the people who worked with Merete Lynggaard just before she disappeared. You might recognize a few of them.”
Carl nodded to everyone. Yes, he did recognize some of them. A number of the politicians sitting here might be able to knock the present government out of power during the next election. One could always hope so, at least. Here sat the party spokesperson in a knee-length skirt; a couple of the more prominent members of parliament; and a few people from the party office, including the secretary Marianne Koch, who sent Carl a flirtatious look, reminding him that in only three hours he was due to be crossexamined by Mona Ibsen.
“As Birger Larsen has no doubt told you, we’re investigating Merete Lynggaard’s disappearance one more time, before we close the case. And in that connection, I need to find out anything that might help me to understand Merete’s behavior during those last few days, as well as her state of mind. It’s my impression that back then, at quite an early stage in the investigation, the police came to the conclusion that she fell overboard by accident, and they were probably right. If that was the case, we’ll never know for certain what happened. After five years in the sea, her body would have decomposed long ago.”
Everyone nodded, looking both solemn and sad. These were the people that Merete would have counted among her colleagues. Perhaps with the exception of the party’s new “crown princess.”
“Many things have turned up that point to an accident,” Carl continued, “so you’d have to be a bit of a conspiracy nerd to think otherwise. At the same time, we in Department Q are a bunch of skeptical devils, and that’s probably why we were given this assignment.” Everyone smiled a bit. At least they were listening. “So I’m going to ask all of you a number of questions, and don’t hesitate to speak up if you have anything to say.”
Most of them nodded again.
“Do any of you remember whether Merete had a meeting with a group lobbying for placenta research shortly before she disappeared?”
“Yes, I do,” said someone from the party office. “It was a delegation put together for the occasion by Bille Antvorskov from BasicGen.”
“Bille Antvorskov? You mean the Bille Antvorskov? The billionaire?”
“Yes, that’s right. He put together the group and arranged a meeting with Merete. They were making the rounds.”
“Making the rounds? With Merete Lynggaard?”
“No.” The woman smiled. “That’s what we call it when a special-interest lobby meets with all the parties, one after the other. The group was trying to put together a majority of votes in the Folketing.”
“Would there be a record of the meeting anywhere?”
“Yes, there should be. I don’t know whether it was printed out, but we might be able to find it on the computer belonging to Merete’s secretary.”
“Does that computer still exist?” asked Carl. He could hardly believe what he was hearing.
The woman from the party office smiled. “We always save the hard drives when we change operating systems. When we switched to Windows XP, at least ten hard drives had to be replaced.”
“Aren’t all of you on a network?”
“Yes, we are, but back then Merete’s secretary and a few others weren’t hooked up to it.”
“Paranoid, perhaps?” He smiled at the woman.
“Maybe.”
“Would you be willing to try to find the minutes of that meeting for me?”
She nodded again.
He turned to the rest of the group. “One of the participants at that meeting was a man named Daniel Hale. From what I’ve heard, he and Merete were interested in each other. Is there anyone here who can confirm or expand on this?”
Several people exchanged glances. Apparently he’d hit home again. Now it was just a matter of who wanted to answer.
“I don’t know his name, but I saw her talking to a man down in Snapstinget, the MPs’ restaurant.” It was the party spokesperson who decided to take the floor. She was an irritating but tough young lady who looked good on TV and would obviously hold major ministry posts in the future, when the right time came. “She looked very pleased to see him, and she seemed rather distracted while she was talking with the chairpersons from the Socialist’s and Radical Center’s health committees.” She smiled. “I think plenty of people noticed.”
“Because Merete didn’t usually act that way? Is that what you mean?”
“I think it was the first time anyone here had ever seen Merete’s attention waver. Yes, it was highly unusual.”
“Could he have been this Daniel Hale that I mentioned?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there anyone else who knows about this?”
They all shook their heads.
“How would you describe the man?” was Carl’s next question for the party spokesperson.
“He was slightly hidden by the pillar he was sitting behind, but he was slim and well dressed and suntanned, as far as I remember.”
“How old was he?”
She shrugged. “A little older than Merete, I think.”
Slim, well dressed, a little older than Merete. If she hadn’t said that he was suntanned, the description would have applied to all the men in the room, including himself, if one didn’t mind adding five or ten years at the wrong end.
“I imagine there must have been a lot of documents from Merete’s time that couldn’t simply be dumped on her successor.” He nodded at Birger Larsen. “I’m thinking about appointment diaries, notebooks, handwritten notes, and things like that. Were those sorts of things just thrown out or shredded? No one could really know whether she would be coming back, could they?”
Again it was the woman from the party office who responded. “The police took some of it, and some of it was discarded. I don’t think much was left.”
“What about her appointment diary? Where did that end up?”
She shrugged. “Not here, anyway.”
Marianne Koch broke in. “Merete always took her diary home with her.” Her tone of voice did not invite contradiction. “Always,” she emphasized.
“What did it look like?”
“It was a very ordinary time system calendar, in a worn, reddish-brown leather cover. A daily planner, appointment book, notebook and phone list all in one.”
“And it hasn’t turned up,” Carl added. “That much I know. So we have to assume that it disappeared into the sea with her.”
“I don’t believe that,” the secretary replied at once.
“Why not?”
“Because Merete always carried a small purse, and the diary simply wouldn’t fit inside. She almost always put it in her briefcase, instead, and I can guarantee that she wouldn’t take her briefcase along to stand on the sun deck of a ship. She was on holiday, after all, so why would she take it with her? It wasn’t in her car, either, was it?”
Carl shook his head. Not as far as he could recall.