Only now did he realize that there were passengers in the car. Motionless and barely visible. Four figures of various sizes.
He waited a few moments, taking note of the surroundings. Quite apart from its color, garish even in darkness, the house was hardly encouraging to look at.
Scrap metal, assorted junk, and machinery no longer in use lay everywhere. It looked like the owner had died years ago and the place had been left to fall apart.
A far cry from the family’s elegant abode in Græsted, Carl thought to himself, his gaze following the headlights of a fast-moving car that swept up the hill from the direction of Ronneby, the beam illuminating the gable end of the house and the yard. For a brief second, a mother’s face, swollen with tears, was made visible through the window of the parked car, and a young woman and two teenagers on the backseat. Everyone in the vehicle seemed to be affected by the situation. They were silent yet clearly upset, their faces filled with fright.
Carl moved forward to the side of the house and put his ear to the rotten wooden cladding. Close up, he could see that only the paint seemed to be keeping the place together.
Inside, words were being exchanged. Two men were arguing, and were obviously far from reaching agreement. The voices were harsh and irreconcilable. It was a shouting match.
When they stopped, Carl hardly had time to catch sight of the man as he slammed the door behind him and almost threw himself into the driver’s seat of the waiting car.
There was a squeal of tires as the Holt family frenziedly reversed onto the road and tore off in a southerly direction. Carl had already made up his mind.
This ugly yellow house was whispering to him.
And he was all ears.
The nameplate read Lillemor Bengtsen, but the woman who opened the yellow door was nothing like the little housewife the name suggested. In her early twenties, with blond hair and slightly overlapping front teeth, she was quite simply adorable, as they used to say in another age.
Maybe Sweden wasn’t that bad, after all.
“I think perhaps you might be expecting me.” He produced his badge. “Would Poul Holt be here, by any chance?”
She shook her head but smiled. For all the ferocity of the disagreement that had just taken place, she had apparently kept herself well out of it.
“How about Tryggve, then?”
“You’d better come in!” she said briskly in Swedish, then indicated a closed door farther inside the house.
“He’s here, Tryggve,” she called into the living room. “I’m going to lie down, OK?”
She smiled at Carl as though they knew each other, then left him alone with her boyfriend.
He was tall and almost painfully thin, but then what had Carl been expecting? He extended his hand and received a firm handshake in response.
“Tryggve Holt,” the young man said by way of introduction. “My father was here to warn me.”
Carl nodded. “My impression was you two weren’t on speaking terms?”
“We’re not. I’m an outcast now. I haven’t spoken to them for four years, but I’ve often seen them parked outside on the road.”
His eyes were calm. They bore no trace of the altercation such a short time ago and seemed unconcerned by the present situation. So Carl went straight to the point.
“We found a message in a bottle,” he said, noting an immediate flicker in the man’s impassive face. “Actually, it turned up in a fishing net off the coast of Scotland some years back, though it only came into our hands at Police Headquarters in Copenhagen a week or so ago.”
Now the reaction was more visible, if not to say undeniable, and what had triggered it were the four words: message in a bottle. As though all these years they had been at the back of his mind. Perhaps he had been waiting for someone to utter them. Perhaps they were the password to all the mysteries that remained inside him.
He bit his lip. “A message in a bottle, you say?”
“Yes, perhaps you’d like to see it.” He handed the young man a copy of the letter.
In the space of two seconds, Tryggve shrank to three-quarters of his size, twisting around on his own axis and knocking everything within reach to the floor. Had it not been for Carl’s quick reflexes, he would have been knocked over in the same way.
“What’s going on?” It was the girlfriend, standing in the doorway with her hair untied, clad in a T-shirt that only just covered her naked thighs. Already on her way to bed.
Carl indicated the letter.
She picked it up, glanced through the contents, and handed it to her boyfriend.
Then no one spoke for several minutes.
When eventually he regained some composure, the young man glanced at the document as though it were a dangerous animal that might pounce at any moment and finish him off for good. As though his only defense was to read it again, word for word.
Lifting his gaze to Carl once more, he was visibly changed. His unruffled self-assurance seemed to have been absorbed by the message he held in his hands. The pulse in his neck throbbed conspicuously, his face was flushed, his lips trembled. There was little doubt that the letter had rekindled a very traumatic experience indeed.
“Oh, God,” he said softly, closing his eyes and putting his hand to his mouth.
His girlfriend took his hand in hers. “It’s all right, Tryggve. It had to come out sooner or later. Now it’s over, and everything’s going to be all right!”
He dried his eyes and turned to face Carl. “I never saw the letter, only watched it being written.”
He picked it up and read it again, his trembling fingers continuously reaching to wipe the tears from the corners of his eyes.
“My brother was the cleverest, kindest person,” he stuttered, his lips quivering still. “But it was so hard for him to express himself.”
He placed the letter on the table in front of him, folded his arms, and leaned forward. “It really was.”
Carl reached to put a hand on his shoulder, but Tryggve shied away and shook his head.
“Can we talk about it tomorrow?” he said. “I can’t now. You can sleep here on the sofa, if you want. Lillemor will make a bed up for you. Would that be OK?”
Carl glanced at the sofa. It was on the short side, but thickly upholstered.
He awoke to the swish of passing cars on the wet road outside. He uncurled and stretched his body, turning in the same movement to face the windows. It was impossible to tell what time it was, though it was still quite dark. Across the room, the young couple sat holding hands in a pair of dilapidated armchairs from IKEA. They nodded. There was already a thermos on the table, and next to it the letter.
“You already know it was my elder brother Poul who wrote it,” Tryggve began, once Carl had shown signs of life with the first aromatic wafts of coffee.
“His hands were tied behind his back.” Tryggve’s eyes flickered as he spoke.
Hands tied. Laursen had been right.
“I haven’t a clue how he managed it,” Tryggve went on. “But Poul was very thorough. He was good at drawing. He was good at a lot of things.”
He smiled mournfully. “You’ve no idea how much it means to me that you’ve come here. To be sitting here with this letter in my hand. Poul’s letter.”
Carl cast his eye once more over the document. Tryggve Holt had added a couple more letters. If anyone could, then surely it was he.
Then Carl took a slurp of his coffee. Only his polite upbringing prevented him from immediately clutching his throat and spraying the hot liquid into the air with an explosion of guttural sound.
It was like drinking tar. Pitch-black caffeinated poison.
“Where is Poul now?” he asked, clenching lips and buttocks as hard as he could. “And why did he write that letter? We’d like to know so we can proceed with other investigations.”