“Look!” Assad pointed. Carl saw what it was immediately. The shape of a small structure close to the shore. An outbuilding of some sort.
“And there,” Assad exclaimed, gesturing toward the trees.
A dim light.
They pressed through the branches of the windbreak and found themselves looking at a redbrick cottage. Timeworn and rather neglected. Light was coming from two windows facing the track.
“He is inside the house, don’t you think?” Assad whispered.
Carl said nothing. How should he know?
“The track leads up to the house on the other side, I think. Maybe we should see if there is a Mercedes there?” Assad whispered again.
Carl shook his head. “There is. Believe me.”
And then they heard the sound. A deep-toned drone coming from the bottom of the garden. Like a motorboat returning home across a calm lake. A gentle, resonant hum in the near distance.
Carl’s eyes narrowed as he listened. They had been right all along. There was a sound. “It’s coming from the outbuilding over there. Can you see it, Assad?”
Assad grunted an affirmative.
“The boathouse must be down in that thicket beyond. Wouldn’t you say, Carl? That would be the fjord there,” Assad surmised.
“Maybe. I’m just worried he might be in there. And about what he might be doing,” Carl replied.
The quiet of the cottage and the disconcerting drone from the outbuilding sent a shiver down his spine.
“We’ll have to go down there, Assad.”
His assistant nodded and handed Carl the torch, now switched off. “Take this for a weapon, Carl. I trust more in my hands.”
They squeezed through bushes that tore at Carl’s injured arm. If his shirt and jacket hadn’t been damp and the drizzle so refreshingly cool, the pain might have brought him to a standstill.
As they neared the outbuilding, the humming sound became more audible. Monotonous, deep, and insistent. Like a well-oiled engine ticking over.
A sliver of light escaped from under the door. Something was going on in there.
Carl pointed to the entrance and tightened his grip on the heavy torch. If Assad flung open the door, he would rush in ready to deliver a blow. They could take it from there.
They stood staring at each other for a moment before Carl gave the sign. Assad gripped the door handle. In a split second it was open, and Carl hurled himself inside.
He scanned the room and lowered the torch. The place was empty. Empty, apart from a stool, a few odd tools left lying on a workbench, a large oil tank, some hoses, and the generator humming on the concrete floor, a throwback to an age when things were built to last forever.
“What is that smell, Carl?” Assad whispered.
Carl recognized the pungent odor instantly. It had been a while since he had last come across it, back in the days when the trend was for antique pine furniture, which had to be stripped down. The acrid, clammy stench that pinched the nostrils. The smell of caustic soda, the smell of lye.
He turned to the oil tank. Horrifying images flashed through his mind. He pulled the stool over, stepping onto it with trepidation before lifting the lid from the tank. He raised the torch, and it occurred to him that he was now one flick of a switch away from the shock of his life. Then he turned on the beam and shone the light into the depths.
But he saw nothing. Only water and a long heating element loosely fixed to the inside wall.
He had no difficulty imagining what the setup might be for.
He turned off the beam, stepped down, and looked at Assad.
“I’m guessing now, but I think the children might still be in the boathouse,” he said. “They might even be alive.”
They left the outbuilding again with extreme caution and stood for a moment in silence as their eyes adjusted once more to the dark. In just three months, it would be as light as day at this time of the evening. But right now, all they could see were indistinct outlines in the space between them and the fjord. Could there really be a boathouse down there, in that low vegetation?
He signaled to Assad to follow on behind. They crept forward, squashing fat slugs beneath their feet. Assad clearly didn’t care for it.
Then they reached the thicket. Carl bent forward and pulled aside a branch. And there, right in front of his eyes, was a door, perhaps half a meter aboveground. He reached out and touched the thick planks in which the door was mounted. They were smooth and damp.
There was a smell of tar. It must have been used to seal the cracks. The same tar Poul Holt had used to seal the bottle containing his last message.
Water sloshed gently in front of their feet. So they had been right: the structure was built out into the fjord, almost certainly on stilts. This was the boathouse they had been looking for.
They had found it.
Carl turned the handle, but the door wouldn’t open. He felt around in the dark and found a bolt fixed with a split pin. He lifted the pin cautiously and allowed it to drop on its chain. If the door was bolted from the outside, then the bastard obviously couldn’t be in there.
He pulled the door open slowly and heard the faint, faint sound of someone catching their breath.
A stench of stagnant water, rotting weed, urine, and excrement greeted his nostrils.
“Is anyone here?” he whispered.
A moment passed, and then came a muffled groan.
He switched on the torch. The sight that met him was gut-wrenching.
Two figures huddled two meters apart in their own filth. Wet clothes, greasy hair. Two bundles of life that had given up all hope.
The boy stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. He was sitting hunched under the roof, his hands tied behind his back, and chained. His mouth was covered by heavy-duty tape that pulsed perceptibly as he breathed. Everything about him was like a scream for help. Carl turned the beam and saw the girl hanging limply in her chains, head flopped to one side as though she were sleeping. But she was awake. Her eyes were open and reacted to the bright light with a series of bewildered blinks. She hadn’t the strength to lift her head.
“We’re here to help you,” Carl said, pulling himself up onto the floor and crawling inside on all fours. “Just stay quiet. You’re going to be all right now.”
He found his mobile and dialed a number. A moment later, he had the Frederikssund police on the line.
He explained himself and asked for immediate assistance before snapping the phone shut.
The boy’s shoulders dropped. The phone call made him relax.
Assad crawled in and removed the tape from the girl’s mouth, then loosened the strap by which her hands were bound. Carl began to help the boy. He was cooperative, though he remained silent even when his gag was removed, shifting his weight so that Carl could reach the buckle of the strap behind his back.
They pulled the children away from the wall and tugged at the chains around their waists, finding them linked to another that was bolted firmly to the thick wooden planks of the wall behind them.
“He put the extra chains around us yesterday and locked them together. Before that, there was only the chain in the wall going through the strap. He’s got the keys,” the boy explained hoarsely.
Carl looked at Assad.
“There was a crowbar in the outbuilding. Can you go and get it, Assad?”
“Crowbar?”
“For Chrissake! A crowbar, yes!”
Carl could see from Assad’s expression that he knew perfectly well what a crowbar was. He just didn’t fancy wading through all those slugs again.
“You take the torch. I’ll fetch it myself.”
Carl squeezed back out through the door. They should have taken that crowbar to begin with. It was a useful weapon, too.
He squelched his way cautiously through the slippery mush of slugs alive and dead and noticed a dim light in one of the windows of the house facing out to the fjord. It hadn’t been there before.