“They should cover your losses, the bastards,” said Carl. He had heard it said on the news.
Laursen nodded. There was no doubt that he agreed, but here he was back again. Last man in. Buttering smørrebrød and washing up. One of the finest forensics officers on the force. What a waste.
“Still, I’m happy enough,” he said. “I see a lot of people I know from when I was out in the field, without having to get back out there with them again.” He smiled awkwardly, just like in the old days. “I got sick of it, Carl. Picking at corpses at all hours of the day and night. Not a single day went by the last five years when I didn’t think of jacking it all in. So the money got me out, even if I did lose it all again. That’s how I choose to look at it, anyway. Nothing’s ever so bad as not to be good for something.”
Carl nodded. “You won’t know Assad, of course, but I’m sure he didn’t drag you down here to discuss the cafeteria menu with an old colleague over a cup of peppermint tea.”
“He told me about the message in the bottle. I think I got the gist of it. Can I see the letter?”
The crafty little-!
Laursen sat down as Carl gingerly removed the document from the folder. Assad came waltzing in with a chased brass tray with three minuscule cups on it.
The smell of peppermint thickened the air. “You will most definitely like this tea,” said Assad as he poured. “It will do wonders for all sorts of things.” He grasped his crotch and winked. The message was abundantly clear.
Laursen switched on another Anglepoise lamp and drew the light up close to the document.
“Do we know who preserved this?”
“A lab in Scotland,” Assad replied. He produced the investigation sheet before Carl had even remembered where he had put it.
“The analysis is here.” Assad placed it in front of Laursen.
“OK,” said Laursen after a few minutes. “I see it was Douglas Gilliam who took care of business there.”
“You know him?”
Laursen gave Carl the kind of look a five-year-old girl would when asked if she knew who Britney Spears was. Hardly respectful, but certainly enough to kindle Carl’s curiosity. Who was this Douglas Gilliam when he was at home, apart from some bloke on the wrong side of the border with England?
“You’re not likely to get very far on this,” said Laursen, picking up his cup of peppermint tea between a thick finger and thumb. “Our Scottish colleagues seem to have done everything in their power to preserve the paper and recover the text by means of various forms of light treatment and chemicals. They’ve found minute traces of printer’s ink, but as far as I can see nothing’s been done to determine the origins of the paper itself. In fact, most of the physical investigation seems to be down to us. Have you run this through the Center of Forensic Services out in Vanløse?”
“No, but then I had no idea the technical investigations were incomplete,” said Carl reluctantly. The mistake was his.
“It says so here.” Laursen indicated the bottom line of the lab report.
Why the hell hadn’t he noticed that? Shit!
“Actually, Carl, Rose did tell me this. But she did not think we needed to know where the paper came from,” Assad chipped in.
“Well, on that count she was most certainly wrong. Let me have another look.” Laursen got up and squeezed his fingers into his pocket. It was no easy task. Rugby thighs in tight jeans.
The type of magnifying glass Laursen now produced was one Carl had seen on many occasions. A small square that could be folded out to stand on top of the object. It looked like the lower part of a little microscope. Standard issue for stamp collectors and similar loonies, but the professional version, equipped with the finest of Zeiss lenses, was most certainly a must for a forensics expert such as Laursen.
He placed it on the document, muttering to himself as he drew the lens across the lines of mostly obliterated writing. He worked systematically from side to side, one line at a time.
“Can you see more characters through that glass?” Assad inquired.
Laursen shook his head but said nothing.
By the time he was halfway through the document, Carl was dying for a smoke.
“Just nipping out for a sec, OK?”
His words were hardly noticed.
He sat down on one of the tables in the corridor and stared blankly at all the equipment they had standing around idle. Scanners, copy machines, and the like. The thought annoyed him. Another time, he would have to make sure Rose finished what she was doing before she dropped everything and split. Poor leadership on his part.
It was at this very moment of painful self-awareness that a series of dull thuds suddenly came from the stairs, making him think of a basketball bouncing down a flight of steps in slow motion, followed by a wheelbarrow with a flat tire. He gawped as a person came toward him looking like a housewife who had just stocked up on duty-frees from the ferries that used to ply the Øresund to Sweden. The high-heeled shoes, the pleated tartan skirt, and the garish shopping cart she dragged in her wake all screamed the fifties more than the fifties probably ever did themselves. And at the upper extremity of this gangling individual was a clone of Rose’s head topped with the neatest peroxide perm imaginable. It was like suddenly being in a film with Doris Day and not knowing how to get out.
In a situation like this, a person smoking a filterless ciggie will invariably end up burning his fingers.
“Ow, fuck!” he spluttered, dropping the end on the floor in front of the colorful newcomer.
“Yrsa Knudsen,” she announced, extending a pair of fingers toward him, her nails painted as red as blood.
Never for the life of him would he have believed that twins could be so similar and yet so different.
He had reckoned on taking control from the word go, and yet here he was fawningly answering her inquiry as to the whereabouts of her office: “Down the corridor past all those sheets of paper flapping on the wall there.” He completely forgot what he had been intending to say: his name and rank, and then a reprimand that the situation she and her sister had contrived was entirely against regulations and must cease forthwith.
“I’m expecting a briefing once I’ve got settled in. Let’s say in an hour, shall we?” And off she went.
“What was that, Carl?” Assad asked as Carl stepped back into his office.
Carl glared at him. “I’ll tell you what it was, Assad. It was a problem. More specifically, it was your problem. In an hour from now, I want you to put Rose’s sister in the picture as to what’s on our desk. Are you with me?”
“So that was Yrsa, the lady who walked past?”
Carl closed his eyes in confirmation. “Are you with me? You’re going to brief her, Assad.”
And then he turned to Laursen, who had now almost finished examining the document. “Anything turning up there?”
Laursen, forensics expert turned purveyor of French fries, nodded and indicated something invisible to the human eye that he had apparently placed on a microscope slide.
Carl stuck his head up close. OK, there did seem to be what looked like the tip of a hair, and next to it something tiny, round, and flat, and otherwise almost transparent.
“That’s a splinter of wood,” Laursen said, pointing at the hairlike fragment. “My guess is it came from the point of the writing instrument used by whoever wrote the letter. It was lodged quite deeply and lay in the direction of the pen. The other thing’s a fish scale.”
He straightened up from his rather awkward position and rolled his shoulders. “Perhaps we’ll get somewhere with this after all, Carl. But we need to get it off to Vanløse first, OK? They should be able to determine the wood type relatively quickly, but finding out what kind of fish that scale belongs to is more likely a job for a marine scientist.”
“Highly interesting,” said Assad. “This is a very well-endowed colleague we have here, Carl.”