He stood in the middle of the courtyard in front of the entrance to the building and scanned the remains. It was hardly the kind of construction on which a preservation order would be slapped, but the galvanized fencing that surrounded the place was new. A glaring contrast.
“I have seen this kind of thing in Syria, Carl. The paraffin stove overheats, then boom…” Assad mimed an explosion with his hands in the air.
Carl gazed up at the first floor. It looked like the roof had lifted and then fallen into place again. Broad fingers of soot extended halfway up the fiber-cement roof cladding from beneath the eaves. The skylights had been blasted to smithereens.
“This didn’t take long,” he mused, then pondered on what might possess anyone to voluntarily spend even the briefest amount of time in such a charmless and godforsaken place as this. But maybe that was the operative word. Maybe it hadn’t been voluntary at all.
“Carl Mørck, Department Q,” he announced to a passing investigator of the younger generation. “Mind if we have a look? Are the SOCOs done?”
The lad gave a shrug. “I don’t think anyone’s going to be done here until the fucking place has been pulled down,” he said. “But mind where you’re going. We’ve put boards down to stop anyone going through the floor, but there’s no guarantee.”
“K. Frandsen Wholesalers? What did they import?” Assad inquired.
“All sorts of stuff for the printing business. All on the level,” said the investigator. “They had no idea someone had occupied the attic, so everyone who works here was pretty shocked. They were lucky the whole place didn’t go up in smoke.”
Carl nodded. Firms of this kind ought always to be located within six hundred meters of a fire station, like this one. By some stroke of luck, the local fire services had survived the idiotic tendering exercise enforced on the public authority by the EU.
As expected, the entire first floor was wiped out. The sheets of plasterboard used to clad the sloping ceilings hung in tatters, and the partition walls that remained upright were jagged peaks reminiscent of the iron constructions of Ground Zero. It was a world laid waste, black with soot.
“Where was the body?” Carl asked an older man who introduced himself as a representative of the insurance company’s own fire investigation team.
The insurance man indicated a stain on the floor, an obvious answer to the question.
“It was a violent explosion, staggered in two separate blasts with only the briefest interlude between,” the man explained. “The first sparked off the blaze, the second drained the room of oxygen and put it out again.”
“So we’re not talking about the usual relatively slow-burning fire where the victim dies of carbon monoxide poisoning?” Carl said.
“No.”
“Could the man have been rendered unconscious by the first explosion, do you think? And then simply have burned to death in the flames?”
“I can’t say. The remains are so few I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. It’s unlikely we’ll find anything left of the respiratory passages in a case like this, so chances are we’re going to be in the dark as to levels of soot concentration in the lungs and trachea.” He shook his head. “It’s hard to believe the body could be so badly damaged in such a short space of time in this particular fire. I mentioned it to your colleagues over in Emdrup the other day.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Well, my take was that the fire had been arranged so as to hide the fact that the victim had died in a different blaze altogether.”
“You mean the body was moved? What did they say to that?”
“They were in complete agreement, as far as I could tell.”
“So we’re dealing with a murder here? A man is murdered, incinerated, and then moved to another fire.”
“Well, we don’t actually know that he was murdered in the first instance at all. But otherwise, I’d consider it highly likely that the body had been moved here. I just can’t see how such a short-lived blaze, albeit a very violent one, could do that kind of damage to a human body. I mean, we’re talking skeleton here.”
“Have you investigated all three fire scenes?” Assad asked.
“I could have done in principle, as I work for more than one insurance company, but Stockholmsgade was given to a colleague of mine.”
“Were the other fire scenes similar to this one?” Carl asked. “I’m thinking about the actual spaces in which the fires were started.”
“No, apart from them all being unused areas. Hence the suggestion that the victims were homeless.”
“You think all the fires are the same? That all the dead bodies were put inside an empty room and then burned all over again?” Assad inquired.
The insurance man considered this unusual investigator with an unruffled stare. “I think we can proceed from that assumption, yes.”
Carl lifted his gaze and looked up at the blackened collar beams. “I’ve got two questions for you, and then I won’t take up any more of your time.”
“Fire away.”
“Why the two explosions, why not just let the whole place burn to the ground following the first? Any ideas?”
“The only thing I can think of is that the arsonist wanted to limit the extent of the damage.”
“Thanks! My second question is, can we call you if we have any further questions?”
The man smiled and produced a business card. “Of course. My name’s Torben Christensen.”
Carl fumbled around in his pocket for a card of his own, fully aware that none existed. This would be another job for Rose when she came back.
“I do not understand.” Assad stood slightly detached, drawing lines in the soot that covered the sloping wall. Apparently, he was the type who with just the smallest dab of paint on his finger could succeed in getting it all over his clothes as well as on just about every object in his immediate surroundings. At any rate, his face and clothing were now smeared in enough soot to cover a medium-size dining table. “I do not understand the significance of what you are talking about. It must all hang together. The ring on the finger, or the finger that is no longer, and then the bodies and the fires, and everything else as well.” He turned abruptly to face the insurance investigator. “How much money does the company want from you for this place? It is a shitty, old place.”
The insurance man wrinkled his brow. The idea of insurance swindle had now been duly presented, though he was by no means necessarily in agreement. “True, the building itself is somewhat lacking, but the company is certainly entitled to be compensated. We’re talking about fire insurance here. As opposed to coverage for rot and fungus.”
“How much?”
“Oh, somewhere in the region of seven, perhaps eight hundred thousand kroner, I’d say.”
Assad whistled. “Will they rebuild on top of the damaged ground floor?”
“That would be entirely up to the policyholders.”
“So they can pull it all down if that is what they want?”
“Certainly.”
Carl looked at Assad. He was definitely on to something.
As they walked back to the car, Carl got the feeling that they were about to blindside their opponent on the very next bend, and that this time the opposition was not the usual villain but the Homicide Division of the Copenhagen Police.
What a triumph it would be to get an advantage over them.
Carl nodded aloofly to the investigators who were still assembled in the courtyard. Why should he even give them the time of day?
Whatever he and Assad needed to know, they could find out for themselves.
Assad stopped for a moment to decipher a row of graffiti: green, white, black, and red letters daubed across an otherwise neatly rendered wall.