He looked at Yrsa, bouncing on the balls of her feet, full of anticipation as to what might now be revealed.
“That’s me and Assad alone, Yrsa. In private.”
“Oh, I get it,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes. “Men’s talk.” And then she turned on her heel and left them in a haze of her perfume.
He fixed his gaze on Assad, forcing his eyebrows almost to the bridge of his nose, hoping that this might be enough to make his assistant come clean. Instead, Assad peered at him solicitously, as though at any moment he might offer Carl a glass of something for heartburn.
“I was over at your place yesterday, Assad. Heimdalsgade, number sixty-two. You weren’t there.”
A tiny furrow appeared in Assad’s cheek, only to miraculously transform into a cheerful dimple. “What a shame, Carl. You should have called me first.”
“I did, Assad, but there was no answer.”
“It would have been nice, Carl. Some other time, perhaps. Yes?”
“But that’d be somewhere else, wouldn’t it?”
Assad nodded, then lit up. “You mean we should meet somewhere in town? Yes, that would be nice, too.”
“I’d want you to bring your wife along, Assad. I’ve been looking forward to meeting her. And your daughters.”
A pained expression passed fleetingly across Assad’s face, as though his wife was the last person on earth he wanted to drag out in public.
“I had a little chat with some people there at Heimdalsgade, Assad.”
The pained look returned, and Assad narrowed his eyes in puzzlement.
“You don’t live there at all, do you? In fact, you haven’t lived there for quite a while. And as for your family, they’ve never lived there, have they? So tell me, Assad, where do you live?”
Assad threw up his arms. “It’s a very small flat, Carl. There was too little room for us.”
“Shouldn’t you have informed me of a change of address in that case? And given up the lease on the place?”
Assad looked pensive. “You are right, Carl. I will do so right away.”
“So where do you live, exactly?”
“We have rented a house. Housing is cheap now, Carl. Many people have two places on their hands. The property market, you know.”
“All right, Assad, I understand. But where are you living? I need an address.”
Assad’s head dropped. “OK, Carl. We are renting the place on a fiddle. Otherwise it would be too expensive. Can we not keep the other place on as a postal address?”
“Where, Assad?”
“In Holte, Carl. A small house only, on Kongevejen. But will you please call beforehand, Carl? My wife does not care for people turning up all of a sudden.”
Carl nodded. He would return to all this another day. “One more thing. Why would your neighbors from Heimdalsgade say you were Shiite? Didn’t you tell me you were from Syria?”
Assad thrust out his fleshy lower lip. “Yes, I did, Carl. And what about it?”
“Are there Shiites in Syria, Assad?”
The man’s bushy eyebrows relocated halfway up his forehead. “You know, Carl,” he smiled, “Shiites are everywhere.”
Half an hour later, they stood in the briefing room in the company of fifteen Monday-morning miseries, with Lars Bjørn and homicide chief Marcus Jacobsen at the center.
No one was here for fun, that much was obvious.
Jacobsen related to the meeting what Carl had reported. This was procedure in Department A. Questions could be posed along the way.
“Tryggve Holt, brother of the murdered Poul Holt, has informed Carl Mørck that their kidnapper, Poul’s killer, was a man known to the family,” Jacobsen said, some way into his briefing. “For a time, our man had frequented prayer meetings held by the boys’ father, Martin Holt, for local members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It seems everyone had taken it for granted that he would enter the congregation.”
“Have we got any photos of this man?” asked Bente Hansen, a chief inspector and formerly one of Carl’s close colleagues.
Deputy Lars Bjørn shook his head. “I’m afraid not, but we do have both a description and a name: Freddy Brink. Presumably false. Department Q already checked it out and no match came up. Our Swedish colleagues in Karlshamn are sending a police artist over to Tryggve Holt, so we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with.”
Marcus Jacobsen stood at the whiteboard, scribbling keywords.
“So he kidnaps the two boys on the sixteenth of February 1996. That’s a Friday, the same day Poul had taken his younger brother Tryggve with him to the College of Engineering in Ballerup where he studied. This Freddy Brink draws up alongside them in a light-blue van, laughing about what a coincidence it was for them to run into each other so far from Græsted. He offers them a lift home. Unfortunately, Tryggve is unable to provide a closer description of the vehicle, other than it being rounded at the front and square at the back.
“The boys climb into the front, and after a while he pulls in at a secluded lay-by and incapacitates them by means of electric shock. We don’t know how, but presumably he’ll have used some kind of stun gun. The boys are then thrown into the back and a cloth is pressed into their faces, most likely soaked in chloroform or ether.”
“Can I just say at this point that Tryggve Holt wasn’t entirely sure about how things actually proceeded here,” Carl interrupted. “He was only half-conscious because of the electric shock, and subsequently his brother wasn’t able to tell him much on account of the tape he was gagged with.”
“Indeed,” Jacobsen went on. “But I’m right in thinking, am I not, that Poul gave his younger brother the impression they had driven for approximately an hour, though of course we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that this might be incorrect? Poul suffered from some kind of autism, and his grip on reality may not always have been firm, despite his rather exceptional intelligence.”
“Asperger’s syndrome, perhaps? I’m thinking of the wording of his message, and the fact that he made a point of noting the exact date, even in the terrible situation they were in. Isn’t that kind of typical?” Bente Hansen asked, pen to paper.
“Maybe it is, yes.” The homicide chief nodded. “Having reached their destination, the boys were left in a boathouse, which smelled strongly of tar and rotting seaweed. The space was rather confined, with only room enough for a man to stoop rather than stand upright. Probably intended for storing canoes or kayaks rather than rowing boats or sailing boats. And there they were held for four, perhaps five days until Poul was murdered. Exactly how much time elapsed is uncertain. We have to bear in mind that Tryggve was only thirteen at the time and very afraid. As such, he spent much of the time sleeping.”
“Any landmarks to go on?” asked Peter Vestervig, one of the guys from Viggo’s unit.
“None,” Jacobsen replied. “The boys were blindfolded when they were led into the boathouse. However, while they saw nothing outside, Tryggve does say he heard a kind of deep rumbling sound that could have come from wind turbines. They heard it often, though not always as loud. Most likely that would have to do with the wind direction and other meteorological factors.”
He fixed his gaze on his empty cigarette packet on the table. He’d got to the point now where it was all he needed to reenergize himself. Good for him.
“We know,” he went on, “that this boathouse was situated in the shallows, presumably built on stilts, since Tryggve tells us that the water lapped beneath the planks of the floor. The entrance would seem to have been raised about half a meter or so off the ground, meaning that a person would have to literally crawl into the low-ceilinged space inside. Tryggve himself believed it to have been made for canoes or kayaks because of the paddles that were still kept there. And he thought the place might have been constructed from some other kind of wood than would normally be used in the Scandinavian tradition. He remembered it as being very pale in color and rather different in terms of grain, but we’ll know more about that later. Laursen, our old friend from Forensics, discovered a splinter lodged in the paper on which Poul Holt wrote his message, apparently from a sliver of wood Poul used as a pen. That’s with the experts at the moment, but it may be able to tell us what kind of wood the boathouse was made of.”