“What makes you think it has anything to do with the arsons going on now, Assad?”
“Arsons?”
“The fire-raising.”
“Because!” said Assad, pointing eagerly at a photograph detailing skeletal remains. “This round groove in the bone of his short finger. It says something about it here, too.” He removed the plastic folder from the notice board and found the page from the report. “Here it is described. ‘As though made by a signet ring over a period of many years,’ it says here. A groove going all the way around.”
“So what?”
“On the short finger, Carl.”
“And?”
“I remember from Department A, there was a body in the first fire that was missing its short finger altogether.”
“OK. The correct term is little finger, Assad. Not short.”
“Exactly. And in the next fire was a groove in the short finger of the man who was found. Just like here.”
Carl’s eyebrows lifted demonstrably.
“I think you should go up to the third floor and tell the chief what you’ve just told me, Assad.”
Assad beamed. “I would never have seen it if it wasn’t for that photo being stuck to the wall in front of my nose all this time. Funny, don’t you think?”
It was as though with her new assignment a chink had appeared in Rose’s impenetrable armor. At any rate, she did not begin by waving the document in his face and shouting but instead removed his ashtray and placed the letter carefully, almost respectfully, on his desk.
“It’s very hard to read,” she said. “It seems it was written in blood, which gradually absorbed dampness from the condensation and drew it into the paper. Besides, the capitals are poorly done. The heading’s quite clear, though. See how legible it is. It says ‘HELP.’”
Carl leaned grudgingly forward and studied what remained of the capital letters. The paper may once have been white, but now it was brown. Its edges were in tatters in several places, with bits missing, presumably lost when the paper was unfolded after being in the water.
“What tests have been done on it, does it say? Where was it found? And when?”
“It was found off the Orkney Islands. Caught up in a fishing net. In 2002, apparently.”
“In 2002! They weren’t in a hurry to pass it on, then.”
“The bottle had been left on a windowsill and forgotten. That’s most likely the cause of the condensation. It’ll have been in the sun.”
“They’re all pissheads in Scotland,” muttered Carl.
“There’s a pretty useless DNA profile here. And some ultraviolet photos. They’ve done their best to preserve the letter. And look, here’s their reconstruction of the wording. Some of it can actually be read.”
Carl looked at the photocopy and immediately regretted his hasty caricature of the Scottish population. Comparing the original letter with the attempt at reconstruction, the results were impressive indeed.
He skimmed through the reconstructed wording. People have always been fascinated by the idea of sending a message in a bottle that might end up on the other side of the world, perhaps leading to new and unexpected adventures.
But that wasn’t the case here. This was deadly serious. Nothing to do with boyish pranks, or a project by Cub Scouts on some exciting field trip. No blue skies and harmony here. The letter was almost certainly what it seemed to be.
A desperate cry for help.
5
The moment he left her, he left behind his day-to-day life. He drove the twenty kilometers or so from Roskilde to the secluded farm-laborer’s cottage that lay almost midway between their home and the house by the fjord. Reversed the van out of the barn and then parked the Mercedes inside. Locked the barn door, took a quick shower, and dyed his hair, changed his clothes and stood in front of the mirror for ten minutes getting ready. He found what he needed in the cupboards, then went outside with his bags to the light-blue Peugeot Partner he used on his trips. An undistinguished vehicle, neither too big nor too small, its mud-spattered number plates not noticeably obliterated at first sight and yet still almost illegible. It was anonymous, and registered in the name he’d used when purchasing the cottage. It suited his purpose.
By the time he reached this stage, he was always thoroughly prepared. Research on the Internet, and in the registers to which he had collected access codes over the years, had yielded the information he required on potential victims. He was flush with cash, using large-denomination notes to pay at petrol stations and toll bridges, always looking away from the cameras, always keeping his distance if anything untoward seemed to be in the air.
This time, his hunting ground was mid-Jutland, a region in which the concentration of religious sects was high. A couple of years had passed since he had last struck there. Whatever else one might say, he spread death with the utmost care and attention.
For some time he had conducted observations, though as a rule only for a couple of days at a time. On the first occasion, he had stayed with a woman in Haderslev, then with another in a small place called Lønne. The risk of being recognized in the Viborg area, so far away, was minuscule.
His choice was among five families. Two were Jehovah’s Witnesses, one was Evangelist, one was with the Guardians of Morality, and the fifth with the Mother Church. As things stood, he inclined toward the latter.
He arrived in Viborg at about eight in the evening, too early by half for what he was intending, especially in a town of this size, but it was better to err on the side of caution.
His criteria for selecting the bars in which he found the women who would put him up were always the same. The place mustn’t be too small. It mustn’t lie in an area in which everyone knew one another. It mustn’t have too many regulars. And it mustn’t be such a dive that no single woman of a certain standard between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five would go there.
The first place on his tour, Julle’s Bar, was too cramped and gloomy, all wooden kitsch and one-armed bandits. The next place was better. There was a small dance floor, and the clientele were a decent mix, with the exception of a gay patron who immediately planted himself on the adjacent bar stool at a distance measurable only in millimeters. If he found a woman there, the guy would almost certainly remember him, despite his polite rejection.
He found what he was looking for at the fifth attempt. The signs above the bar counter seemed to confirm it: The quiet ones are the wild ones, The Terminal-your home from home, and perhaps in particular Best boobs in town are here all struck the right tone.
The Terminal, tucked away in the street called Gravene, closed early at eleven o’clock, but people were well in the mood on Hancock Høker ale and local rock music. He felt sure he’d get off with someone before closing.
He picked out a woman, not exactly young, sitting near the slot machines. She had been dancing on her own when he came in, her arms floating free at her sides on the tiny dance floor. She was quite pretty, certainly no easy prey. A serious fisher in these waters. A woman who wanted a man she could trust, someone worth waking up next to for the rest of her life, not someone she reckoned on finding here. She was obviously just out with some girlfriends from work after a hard day’s slog.
Two of her giggly, well-proportioned colleagues stood swaying to the music in the smoking cabin; the rest had taken possession of a number of the establishment’s mismatched tables. Most likely the girls had been partying for some time already. At any rate, he felt fairly certain none of the others would be able to describe him in any detail in a couple of hours’ time.