“I’d like you to call those officers back now. This is all a misunderstanding. As indeed I tried to make you aware when we spoke in Hallabro.”
Carl nodded. The man was still scared. Thirteen years of fear had hardened him against anything that threatened to burst the bubble with which he had surrounded himself and his family.
“We have spoken to Tryggve,” Carl said, pushing the Swedish police artist’s drawing across the desk. “As you can see, we already have a likeness of the perpetrator. For the purpose of our inquiries, I want you to give us your version of what happened. It might give us something more to go on. We realize that you feel threatened by this man.” He planted his finger so demonstratively on the drawing that Martin Holt jumped.
“You have my assurance that no unauthorized person knows that we’re on to him, so try to relax.”
The man removed his gaze reluctantly from the drawing in front of him and looked Carl straight in the eye. His voice trembled as he spoke. “How easy do you think it will be for me to explain to the Jehovah’s Witness circuit overseers why I was taken in by the police? And you’re telling me no one else knows there’s something afoot? You’ve hardly been discreet about it.”
“All this could have been avoided if only you had let me into your home in Sweden. That trip was part of an effort to catch Poul’s murderer.”
Martin Holt’s shoulders dropped. His eyes returned to the drawing on the desk. “It’s a good likeness,” he said. “But his eyes weren’t so close together, and not quite as dark. That’s all I can tell you.”
Carl stood up. “I’m going to show you something you’ve never seen until now.” He gestured for Martin Holt to follow him.
From Assad’s office came the sound of laughter. The distinctive, booming laughter of West Jutland that most likely had evolved to drown out the engines of fishing boats in stormy weather. Assad certainly had the knack of entertaining. And with the young officers from Holbæk in his assistant’s capable hands, Carl was in no hurry.
“Have a look at how many unsolved cases we’ve got here,” he said, directing Martin Holt’s gaze toward Assad’s filing system on the wall. “Each of these cases involves some dreadful event, and in each case the grief that event has caused will hardly differ from your own.”
He looked at the man next to him, whose eyes remained cold as ice. These cases were nothing to do with him, and the people involved in them were not his brethren. What happened outside the world of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was seemingly of little concern to him.
“We could have picked out any one of these cases on which to focus our efforts. Do you understand? But we chose the one concerning your son. And now I’m going to show you why.”
The man followed him the last few meters along the corridor. Like a dead man walking.
Then Carl pointed at Rose and Assad’s blowup of the message in the bottle. “That’s why,” he said, and stepped back.
Martin Holt stood for a long time reading the message. So slowly did his eyes pass over the lines that Carl could follow how far he had read. And when he had finished, he started from the beginning again. He was a pillar, slowly crumbling. A human being for whom principles were more important than anything else. But also a man endeavoring to protect his remaining children by suppression and lies.
Now he stood here absorbing the words of his dead son. As halting as they were, they went straight into his heart. And suddenly he staggered backward, reaching his hands out behind him to support himself against the wall. Had it not been there, he would have fallen. Here were his son’s pleas for help, as loud as the trumpets of Jericho. Help he had been unable to provide.
Carl allowed him to stand for a moment alone with his tears. Then Martin Holt stepped forward and placed a cautious hand against his son’s letter. His hands trembled upon this contact, and gradually, slowly, his fingers traced backward from word to word, as high up the wall as he could reach.
Finally, his head dropped to one side. Thirteen years of pain released.
When they returned to Carl’s office, he asked for a glass of water.
And then he told Carl everything he knew.
36
“The troops are gathered again,” Yrsa hollered from the corridor, seconds before her head appeared around Carl’s door. Judging from the state of her hair, she must have passed through the basement like a whirlwind.
“Tell me you love me,” she twittered, dropping a stack of aerial photos onto the desk in front of Carl.
“Did you find the house, Yrsa?” Assad shouted back, dashing in from his cubbyhole.
“No such luck. But I did find some possibilities, though none with any boathouse visible. The photos are in the order that I’d check them out if I were you. I’ve put rings around the houses I think are interesting.”
Carl picked up the stack and counted. Fifteen sheets and no boathouse. What the hell was she playing at?
He glanced at the dates. Most of the photos were from June 2005.
“Hey!” he exclaimed. “These were taken nine years after Poul Holt was murdered, Yrsa. That boathouse could have been pulled down and rebuilt a dozen times since then.”
“A dozen times?” Assad intervened. “No, I do not think that can be correct, Carl.”
“It’s a figure of speech, Assad.” Carl took a deep breath. “Haven’t we got anything older than this?”
Yrsa winked at him. Was he putting her on?
“Do you know what, Mr. Detective?” she said. “If that boathouse was pulled down, it’s hardly going to matter much now, is it?”
Carl shook his head. “Wrong, Yrsa. The killer may still own the house, in which case we might find him there, no? Get back upstairs to Lis and find some older photos.”
“The same fifteen areas?” She indicated the stack on his desk.
“No, Yrsa. For the entire shoreline of the fjords prior to 1996. That can’t be so hard to understand, surely?”
She stood and tugged for a moment at her curls, somewhat deflated, then turned and slunk off as best she could in her less-than-sensible shoes.
“I think it will be no easy task to make her glad again,” Assad commented, fanning his hand in the air as if he had just burned his fingers. “Did you observe how annoyed she was with herself, because she did not think about the detail of the date?”
Carl heard a buzzing sound and saw the fly land on the ceiling. Back with bragging rights.
“Never mind, Assad. She’ll get over it.”
Assad shook his head. “Yes, Carl. But remember, no matter how hard you sit down on the fencepost, your arse will hurt when you stand up.”
Carl frowned, wondering if he had understood him right.
“Do all your sayings involve arseholes, Assad?” he replied, dodging the issue.
Assad chuckled. “I know one or two without,” he said. “But they are poor.”
OK. If this was par for the course with Syrian humor, his laughter muscles could take things easy if he were ever so unfortunate as to get an invite to visit the place.
“What did Martin Holt tell you when you questioned him, Carl?”
Carl picked up his notepad. Not that he had written much down, but what he had noted certainly seemed useful.
“Contrary to what I expected, Martin Holt is not an entirely unlikable man,” Carl said. “Your blowup out in the corridor put his feet back on the ground.”
“So he told you about Poul?”
“He did. He spoke nonstop for half an hour. In a very shaky voice.” Carl plucked a smoke from his breast pocket and turned it between his fingers. “Getting things off his chest, you could say. He hasn’t spoken to anyone about his son for years. The pain of it was too much for him.”
“What does it say on your notepad, Carl?”
Carl lit his cigarette, sparing a thought for Jacobsen’s unsatisfied nicotine cravings. Sometimes a person could rise so far that he was no longer his own boss. It was a place Carl had no intention of going.