Yrsa looked at him as though he’d suggested something indecent. “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,” she said.
This did not bode well.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a lot easier to do it online. Who wants to hang around on the phone all day?”
Carl struggled to ignore his ego crying for help from beneath the heel of her shoe. Maybe he should give her the benefit of the doubt.
“Carl, look at this,” said Assad, appearing in the doorway, then stepping aside to allow Yrsa to get past.
“I have been studying it for a long time now,” he went on, placing the photocopied letter on the desk in front of Carl. “What do you think? I found myself unable to escape the thought that it said ‘Ballerup’ there in the second line, and then I looked in the street atlas and searched through all the road names in Ballerup. I discovered that the only one to fit the word just in front of the ‘i’ is called Lautrupvang. The writer of the letter has written ‘Lautrop’ with an ‘o,’ but we know now that his spelling was very poor.”
For a brief moment Assad’s gaze locked on to the fly buzzing around below the ceiling. Then he looked at Carl.
“What do you think, Carl? Could it be like this?” He indicated the relevant passage in the photocopy. It now ran:
HELP
The.6 febrary 1996 we were kidnaped he got us at the bus sdop on Lautropvang in Ballerup-The man is 18. tall…h…r. hair
Carl nodded. It all seemed rather likely, no question about that. In which case, they should get their noses into the archive without delay.
“You nod, Carl. You think this is right. Oh, that is good,” Assad exclaimed and almost threw himself over the desk to plant a kiss on Carl’s forehead.
Carl recoiled and looked daggers at him. Sticky cakes and sweet tea were acceptable. But emotional outbursts of this Middle Eastern dimension was taking things to extremes.
“Now, we know the date to be either the sixteenth or the twenty-sixth of February in 1996,” Assad went on unabashed. “We also know the place, and that the kidnapper is a man who is more than one hundred and eighty centimeters tall. Now we need the last words in the line, which are having something to do with his hair.”
“Indeed, Assad. Plus the small matter of sixty-five percent of the rest of the letter,” said Carl.
Apart from that, Assad’s theory seemed to be sound.
Carl grabbed the document, jumped to his feet, and went out into the corridor to look at the blowup on the wall. If he had imagined Yrsa at this moment to be busy plowing through the annual reports of the three firms that had been hit by arson, he could think again. Here she was, standing in the middle of the corridor absorbing the magnified message in front of her.
“It’s OK, Yrsa, this is something we’re taking care of,” said Carl. Yrsa didn’t budge.
Cognizant of behavioral likenesses among twins, Carl elected simply to shrug and leave well alone. Sooner or later she would presumably succumb to a stiff neck, the way she was standing.
Carl and Assad stood next to her. Looking at Assad’s suggested text and comparing it with the version on the wall, Carl found that faint and yet plausible corroborations, hitherto unseen, somehow seemed to present themselves.
In fact, Assad’s take on the first few lines appeared more than credible.
“Well, it looks right to me,” he said, then sent Assad off to check once again whether any crime had been reported that could even remotely be linked to a case of kidnapping on Lautrupvang in Ballerup in 1996.
Most likely Assad would be able to report back by the time Carl returned from Rødovre.
Antonsen was sitting in the cramped space of his office. The place reeked of banned pipe tobacco and cigarillos. No one ever saw him smoke, though undeniably he did. Rumor had it he remained on the job until the office staff went home just so he could light up in peace. It was years since his wife had proclaimed that he had finally stopped for good. Apparently, she was oblivious.
“Here’s the report on the company on Damhusdalen,” said Antonsen, handing him a plastic folder. “Like it says on the first page, they’re an import-export company whose partners were registered in the former Yugoslavia. So they were probably faced with a difficult transition when the war broke out in the Balkans and everything fell apart at the seams.
“These days, Amundsen and Mujagic A/S is a flourishing business, but when it burned down, they hit bottom financially. At the time, we had no reason to believe the company was anything less than aboveboard, and that basically would still be our standpoint today. But if you’ve got anything to add in that respect, you’re more than welcome.”
“Amundsen and Mujagic. Mujagic’s a Yugoslavian name, right?” Carl ventured.
“Yugoslavian, Croatian, Serbian. Same difference if you ask me. I don’t think there’s an Amundsen or a Mujagic left in the company these days. You can check if you want.”
Carl rocked gently in his chair and considered the man opposite him.
Antonsen was an all-right policeman. He was a few years older than Carl and had always ranked above him, yet still they’d shared a lot of laughs and professional tussles, all of which had demonstrated that they were two of a kind.
Woe betide anyone who blew his horn at their expense. Moreover, they were both immune to all forms of bullshit, backslapping, and corridor gossip. If anyone on the force, at least in the capital region, was utterly unsuited to diplomacy, political maneuvering, or siphoning public funds to meet their own professional ends, it was Carl Mørck and Antonsen. Which was why Antonsen had never risen to commissioner and Carl had amounted to sod all. Neither of them gave a shit.
But now there was something niggling Carl. That fucking fire. And then, as now, Antonsen had been in charge of the shop.
“My feeling on this,” said Carl, “is that the key to clearing up these recent arsons in Copenhagen lies in this blaze of yours in Rødovre. A body was found in the remains, and the bone of the little finger clearly indicated that the victim had worn a ring for a good many years. Exactly the same thing turns up again with the victims of these latest fires. So I need to know-and I want you to be frank with me on this, Anton-if you consider that case to have been properly handled at the time. I’m asking you straight out, you can tell me your answer and we’ll leave it at that. But I need to know, in view of the way you led the investigation at the time, and with the officers you had on the job. Did you have any personal dealings with that company? Is there anything at all at any point in time that links you to Amundsen and Mujagic A/S?”
“Are you accusing me of acting unlawfully, Carl Mørck?” Antonsen’s eyes narrowed, and all the joviality of earlier fell away.
“Not at all. I just can’t fathom how your boys never got around to establishing with one hundred percent certainty the cause of the blaze and the identity of the body that was found in the ruins.”
“So you’re accusing me of obstructing my own investigation, is that it?”
Carl looked Antonsen in the eye. “If you put it that way, I suppose I am. Am I right? Because if I am, it means I’ve got something to go on.”
Antonsen handed Carl a bottle of Tuborg, which Carl kept in his hand until they were finished talking. Antonsen gulped down a mouthful of his own.
The old fox wiped his mouth and thrust out his lower lip. “We weren’t alarmed by the case, Carl, if truth be told. A roof fire and an unlucky tramp, that’s how we looked at it. And to be honest, I suppose I allowed it all to slide. Not the way you’re thinking, though.”