“How come, then?”
“Because at the time, Lola was shagging someone else at the station, and I was drinking my way through the crisis.”
“Lola?”
“Believe it or not, yes. But listen, Carl. She and I pulled through. It’s all in the past, and everything’s fine now. But I will concede that I ought to have been more on the ball in that particular case.”
“OK, Anton. That’s good enough for me. We’ll stop here.”
Carl stood up and glanced at Antonsen’s pipe, lying there on its side like a boat stranded in a desert. In a moment or two, it would be sailing again. Office hours or not.
“Oh, hang on a sec,” Antonsen said as Carl was halfway through the door. “One more thing. Remember last summer, that murder in one of the high-rises here in Rødovre? I said to you then that if you lot at HQ weren’t nice to Samir Ghazi, I’d personally make sure you wished you’d never heard of me. Now I hear Samir’s applying to come back to us.” He picked up his pipe and began to stroke it. “What’s the story there? Any idea? He’s not saying a word to me, but as far as I understand it Jacobsen’s been well pleased with him.”
“He was your sergeant, wasn’t he? I’m afraid I haven’t got a clue. Hardly even know him.”
“Well, I can tell you Department A are at a loss to understand it, too. Word is, though, that it has something to do with one of your lot.”
Carl searched his mind. Why should it have anything to do with Assad? On the other hand, he’d been keeping away from Samir since day one. Why would Assad want to do that?
Now it was Carl’s turn to thrust out his lower lip.
“Well, I’ll ask around, but right now I wouldn’t know. Maybe Samir just misses working with his old boss?” He gave Antonsen a wink. “Say hello to Lola for me, eh?”
He found Yrsa exactly where he had left her, in the middle of the corridor in front of Rose’s enormous blowup of the message in the bottle. Her face was pensive, and she was standing with one leg drawn up under her skirt like a flamingo, as if in a trance. Apart from the clothes, it was Rose all over. It was enough to put the wind up a bloke.
“Have you been through those annual reports from the Business Authority?” he asked.
She glanced at him absently, tapping her forehead with a pencil. He was by no means certain she had even registered his presence.
He filled his lungs with air and discharged the question into her face for the second time. The batty woman gave a slight start, her only discernible reaction.
Just as he was about to turn and go, shaking his head in total bewilderment as to what the blazes he was supposed to do with these decidedly original sisters, she began to speak, softly and yet with such clarity he could hear every word.
“I’m good at Scrabble and crosswords and IQ tests and Sudoku, and I’m not bad at writing verse and occasional songs for confirmations and birthdays and wedding anniversaries. But this isn’t working for me at all.” She turned to face Carl. “Is it OK if you just leave me alone for a bit so I can have a think about this terrible letter?”
Was it OK? She’d been standing there all the time he’d been to Rødovre and back again, and now she wanted him to leave her alone? Seriously, she could pack her gear back in that eyesore of a shopping cart of hers and wheel her tartan robes and bagpipes and all the rest of her junk back to Vanløse or wherever the hell it was she came from.
“Listen, Yrsa,” he said, trying as best he could to be nice. “Either you get those reports back to me in the next twenty-seven minutes, annotated with notes for my guidance, or else I’ll have no option but to ask Lis from the third floor to write out a check on the spot for four hours of your totally superfluous presence here. In which case, you would be wise not to be banking on any pension scheme. Am I making myself clear?”
“My goodness, what a shitload of words, if you’ll excuse my French.” She beamed a smile at him. “Have I told you, by the way, how well that shirt suits you? Brad Pitt’s got one exactly the same.”
Carl cast a glance down at his checked monstrosity from the Kvickly supermarket. All of a sudden, he felt strangely homeless in the basement.
He withdrew into Assad’s so-called office to find the man with his feet up on the top drawer and the phone stuck to the blue-black stubble on his face. In front of him were ten pens, most likely now missing from Carl’s own office, and underneath them reams of paper filled with scribbled names and figures and Arabic friezes. He was speaking slowly and with remarkable clarity. His whole being exuded authority and composure, and in his hand was a Lilliputian cup of aromatic coffee. If Carl didn’t know better, he’d think he was in a travel agent’s office in Ankara, and the manager was in the process of chartering a jumbo jet for thirty-five oil sheiks.
Assad turned to face him and sent him a crinkly smile.
Apparently, he wanted to be left alone as well.
It was like an epidemic.
Perhaps the best thing in the circumstances would be a restorative snooze in his office chair. He could run a film on the inside of his eyelids about a fire in Rødovre and cross his fingers that the case had been solved by the time he opened them again.
He had just settled into place with his feet on the desk when this alluring and life-prolonging plan was interrupted by the sound of Laursen’s voice.
“Is there anything left of the bottle, Carl?” he asked.
Carl blinked with surprise. “Bottle, what bottle?” Laursen’s food-stained apron gradually came into focus, and Carl returned his feet to the floor. “The bottle, yeah. Well, there’s three thousand five hundred pieces of it each the size of an ant’s dick in a plastic bag in the cupboard here, if that’s what you mean.”
He produced the transparent bag, holding it up in front of Laursen’s face. “Would that be any good to you?”
Laursen nodded and indicated a shard rather larger than the rest at the bottom of the bag.
“I just spoke to Douglas Gilliam, the forensics man from Scotland. He advised me to take the biggest piece remaining of the bottle end and then have a DNA analysis done on the blood traces. That must be it there. The blood’s even visible.”
Carl was about to ask if he could borrow Laursen’s magnifying glass, but found he could see without it. The blood was hardly there, and what little there was looked completely impoverished.
“Didn’t they do that themselves?”
“No, he says they only took samples from the letter itself. But he says we shouldn’t reckon on finding anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s so little of it to test, and because it’s likely to be too old. Besides, the climate inside the bottle and all that time in seawater would be highly detrimental to the genetic material. Heat and cold, and then maybe a drop or two of salt water. The changing light. It all points to the DNA having perished.”
“Does DNA change as it’s broken down?”
“No, it doesn’t change. It just deteriorates. But with all the adverse factors here, that might not make any difference in this case.”
Carl considered the smidgeon of blood on the shard. “What if they do get a result? What good would it do us? We can’t identify a body because we haven’t got one. And we can’t compare the genetic material with that of relatives because we don’t know who they are. We don’t even know who wrote the letter, so I can’t see how it would help, to be honest.”
“If we’re lucky, we can determine skin color, eye color, and hair color. Worth a go, wouldn’t you say?”
Carl nodded. Laursen was right, no two ways about it. The people at the Department of Forensic Medicine’s Section of Forensic Genetics were amazing, he knew that. He had once attended a lecture given by the deputy head of the section. If anyone could determine whether the victim was lame, spoke with a lisp, or was a redheaded Greenlander from Thule, it was those guys.