“Martin Holt said our drawing was a good likeness, but the kidnapper’s eyes were too dark and too close together. The mustache was too big and the hair probably a bit longer over the ears.”
“Should we have a new one done, Carl?” Assad asked, wafting away the smoke in front of him.
Carl shook his head. Tryggve’s take could be just as good as his father’s. The human eye interpreted differently depending on the beholder.
“The most important thing, though, was that Martin Holt could tell me exactly how and where the kidnapper took receipt of his ransom. A bag containing the money was simply thrown off a train. The man had a strobe light, and-”
“What is a strobe light?”
“A strobe light?” Carl took a good drag. “It’s a kind of light they use in discos. They flash like a camera.”
“Oh!” Assad beamed. “It makes people look like they are jumping, like in the old films. I know this very well.”
Carl pondered his cigarette. Did it taste of syrup, or what?
“Holt was able to give us a fairly exact location for where the delivery took place,” he said. “A stretch of road running alongside the railway between Sorø and Slagelse.” Carl got out his map and pointed. “Here, between Vedbysønder and Lindebjerg.”
“It looks like a good place,” Assad commented. “Close to the railway and not so far from the motorway, allowing him to get away again quickly.”
Carl traced the railway on the map. Assad was right. It was a perfect spot.
“How did the kidnapper get Poul’s father to that place?” Assad asked.
Carl studied his cigarette packet. How the fuck did that syrup taste get there?
“He was instructed to get on a certain train from Copenhagen to Korsør, and then to keep an eye out for the strobe. He was to sit in a first-class compartment on the left-hand side of the train, and as soon as he saw the light he was to throw the bag with the money out of the window.”
“When did he then find out that Poul was murdered?”
“When? He received further instructions over the phone as to where he could pick up the children. But when he and his wife arrived, they found only Tryggve lying in a field. He’d been given something to knock him out, probably chloroform. Tryggve was the one who told his parents that Poul had been murdered, and that they would lose more children if anything should get out about the kidnapping. Apart from the terrible news of Poul’s death, Tryggve’s shock over what had happened made an indelible impression on Martin Holt and his wife.”
Assad drew his shoulders up to his ears as a shiver seemingly ran down his spine. “If it had been my children, then…” He passed his index finger across his throat and let his head flop to one side.
Carl didn’t doubt his assistant meant what he said. He consulted his notepad again. “At the end of our interview, Martin Holt told me one final thing that may prove useful to us.”
“What was that, Carl?”
“The key ring on which the kidnapper kept his car keys also had a miniature bowling ball with the number one on it.”
The phone on Carl’s desk rang. Probably Mona wanting to thank him for being so accommodating.
“Mørck?” boomed a voice at the other end, which turned out to belong to Klaes Thomasen. “Just to inform you that we took advantage of the good weather early this morning, and the wife and I have now sailed through the rest of the area we picked out. As far as we can see, there’s nothing visible from the water, but there are several places in which the vegetation is very thick and runs right down to the shore, so we’ve marked them down for you.”
Once again, a bit of plain old-fashioned good luck wouldn’t have gone amiss.
“What area did you reckon might be the most promising?” Carl asked, stubbing out his syrupy smoke in the ashtray.
“Well…” Carl could almost see Thomasen with his pipe in his mouth. Probably still in his sailing togs on the jetty. “I’d say we should be focusing on Østskov near Sønderby, as well as Bognæs and Nordskoven. There were quite a few secluded spots, but like I said we couldn’t see anything for sure. I’ll have a word with the forest officer from Nordskoven later on today. Maybe he can help us out.”
Carl made a note of the three locations and said thanks. He promised to say hello to some of Thomasen’s old mates on the force. It had been years since any of them had worked at HQ, but Carl spared him that information for the sake of politeness, then hung up.
“Nothing,” Carl said, as he turned toward Assad. “Nothing concrete to go on from Thomasen, though he did mention a couple of areas we might want to take a closer look at.” He found them on the map. “Let’s see if Yrsa can come up with something a bit better than before, then we can compare the data. In the meantime, just carry on with what you’re doing.”
He managed to get in half an hour’s wholesome shut-eye with his feet up on the desk before a tickling sensation on the bridge of his nose dragged him back to consciousness. He shook his head vigorously, opened his eyes, and found himself to be the focus of a horde of shiny, blue-green flies in avid search of somewhere else to lay their eggs besides the gooey substance he found stuck to his cigarette packet.
“Bastards!” he spluttered, flailing his arms in the air and sending at least a couple of the pesky things hurtling backward onto the floor with all legs splayed.
This was the last straw.
He peered into his wastebasket. It had been weeks since he had thrown anything out, and there was his rubbish still, though organic matter of the kind that might tempt procreating flies was wholly absent.
Carl glanced out into the corridor. There was another one of the bastards. He found himself wondering whether one of Assad’s exotic lunchtime treats had come back from the dead. Maybe his tahini had come alive, or perhaps his sickening Turkish delight was about to hatch out some imported pests?
“Do you know anything about these flies?” he demanded, even before walking into Assad’s matchbox office.
There was a penetrating smell inside the room. Not the usual sugary scent. More like someone had been playing with a Zippo lighter.
Assad held him off for a moment with a hand in the air, absorbed in a phone call. “Yes,” he repeated a few times into the receiver. “But we shall need to come and see for ourselves,” he said eventually, his voice slightly deeper, his countenance slightly more authoritative than normal. He made an appointment and put down the phone.
“I asked if you knew anything about these flies,” Carl said again, pointing to a couple that had settled on a kitschy poster depicting some camels traipsing through a large amount of sand.
“Carl, I think we have found a family now,” Assad said, though with a rather skeptical look on his face. Like a man who had just studied his lottery ticket and discovered all the numbers fit the jackpot.
“A what?”
“A family who has been in the hands of our kidnapper. I think so.”
“Would that be the people from the House of Christ, the ones you told us about before?”
Assad nodded. “Lis found them. New address and new names, but the same people. She checked with the Civil Registration System. Four children. The youngest, Flemming, was fourteen years old five years ago.”
“Did you ask where the boy is today?”
“No, I did not think that to be so clever at this point.”
“What was the bit about our having to come and see for ourselves?”
“Oh, I told the wife that we were from the tax authorities, and we found it odd that their youngest son, the only one of their children who seems not to have emigrated, did not send in his tax returns, despite him being over eighteen now.”
“Assad, that’s not right. We can’t go around passing ourselves off as civil servants from other authorities. Anyway, how did you find out about him not submitting tax returns?”