Help us, she wanted to say. Search my car. Find his address in the glove compartment. The GPS will tell you where we’ve been. It’ll be the arrest of your life.
She was ready to kneel before Rachel’s Lord in heaven, if only He would give her the power of speech for just a moment. Just for a single breath.
But she lay there mute and could only listen to the rattle of her throat. To words that dissolved into consonants and vowels, consonants and vowels that dissolved into saliva bubbling between her teeth.
Why had she not called her brother when she had the chance? Why hadn’t she done the right thing? Had she thought she was some kind of superhuman who could stop the Devil himself?
“You’re lucky you weren’t driving, Isabel. You’ll be prosecuted, of course, though I don’t think they’ll get a conviction for incitement to dangerous driving. You’ll have to get yourself a new car, though.” He forced a chuckle.
But there was nothing to laugh about.
“What happened, Isabel?” he asked, though she hadn’t yet shown herself able to speak.
She pursed her lips slightly. Perhaps he might understand. Just a part of it.
Then came the sound of a dark voice over by Rachel’s bed.
“I’m sorry, but we shall have to send you out again, Mr. Jønsson. Isabel’s going to be transferred now. Perhaps you might like to visit the cafeteria in the meantime. We’ll be sure to let you know where Isabel’s been moved to when you come back. Say, in about half an hour?”
She didn’t recognize the voice as one of those from earlier in the day.
But when the voice spoke again, and her brother finally got to his feet, giving her hand a squeeze to say he would be back later, she knew it was no use.
For she knew the voice, now the only voice left in the room.
She knew it all too well.
For a brief time, she had thought it might give her something to live for.
Now she realized that nothing could be further from the truth.
39
Carl had spent the night with Mona and almost dislocated every joint in his body. This time, she had waited for neither sweet words nor assurances that she was the only woman in his life. She had simply heaved her blouse over her head and got rid of her knickers with unfathomable dexterity.
Afterward, it had taken him half an hour to realize where he was, and the other half to consider whether he would survive another bout.
She was a different woman since she had come back from Africa. So very much there, so very present all of a sudden. The fine lines around her eyes took his breath away. The slight upward curl of her painted lips would become, in a moment, a smile that could strip him of all his thoughts.
If ever there were a woman for him, she was the one, he thought to himself as she came to him again with her warm breath, clawing him softly with her nails.
The next morning, when she woke him up, she was already dressed and ready for the day. Sensual, smiling, soaring.
What more evidence did a man need, still pinned down by his duvet, legs heavy as lead?
This woman was superior to him in every way.
“What is the matter with you, Carl?” Assad asked as they climbed into the car.
Carl hadn’t the energy to answer. How could he, when his body felt like he had been run over by a bus and his nuts were throbbing like a pair of gumboils?
“Vedbysønder coming up here,” said Assad, after the best part of an hour watching the stripes in the middle of the road pass by.
Carl looked up from the GPS and gazed out at a small cluster of farms and cottages, a landscape of fields. Sparsely populated. Decent road surface. Trees and patches of dense vegetation. A good place to collect a ransom.
“Continue on past the building there.” Assad pointed down the road. “We cross over a bridge, and there we must peel our eyes.”
As soon as the first farmhouse appeared by the railway bridge, Carl recognized the place Martin Holt had described to him. Cottages on both sides of the road. The railway running behind the houses on the left. A little farther on a couple of buildings on their own, and then, at an angle, an unpaved byroad leading off toward the tracks. After that, a narrow band of trees and thicker vegetation on the bend. This was the place where at least two of the kidnapper’s victims had dropped their money from the train.
They pulled in at the byroad, which dipped under a little viaduct, switching on the blue light so as to be clearly seen if another vehicle should happen by in the morning haze.
Carl got out of the car with difficulty and considered perking himself up with a smoke. Assad already had his eyes fixed on the earth at his feet.
“It is wet here,” he said, mostly to himself. “Quite wet. It may have been raining recently but not so much. See for yourself.”
He pointed to a set of wheel tracks, clearly visible in the dirt.
“Look. A car drew forward to this place here, very slowly,” he said, getting down on his haunches. “And here he accelerated away, like he was in a hurry.”
Carl nodded. “Either that, or the wheels just span with it being so wet.”
Carl lit his cigarette and looked around. They knew two men had thrown bags containing ransom money out of a train window onto the field here, but neither of them had seen the car. All they had seen was the flashing strobe light.
In both cases, the train had come from the east, so the bags could have landed anywhere on the field right up to the cottage that stood on its own a couple of hundred meters away. The place looked like it had been done up only recently, so maybe the owners hadn’t been here in 2004 when Flemming Emil Madsen’s father made his drop. Even if they had, they were hardly likely to have seen anything that could give the police something to go on. It was usually the way.
Carl reached his hands behind his neck and stretched, exhaling smoke into the damp air that rose up from the earth with the burgeoning warmth of March. The scent of Mona was still in his nostrils. How the fuck was he expected to think straight now? How could he think about anything but seeing her again?
“Look, Carl. There is a car leaving the house up there.” Assad pointed toward the cottage. “Should we stop it, do you think?”
Carl dropped his cigarette and ground it beneath the sole of his shoe.
The woman behind the wheel looked disconcerted as she pulled in behind the flashing blue light.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is there something the matter with my lights?”
Carl gave a shrug. How was he supposed to know? “We’re interested in this piece of land here. Does it belong to you?”
She nodded. “Up to the trees over there. What about it?”
“Hi, I am Hafez el-Assad,” said Assad, extending a hairy mitt through the car window. “Have you ever seen anyone throw anything from the train here?”
“No, I don’t think so. When were you thinking of?” the woman asked. Her eyes were livelier now that she realized they weren’t about to give her a ticket.
“More than once. Some years ago, perhaps. Have you ever seen a car waiting here?”
“Not years ago. We only moved in recently.” She smiled, plainly relieved. “We’ve just finished rebuilding. You can see we’ve still got the scaffolding around the back.” She pointed toward the house, then turned her gaze to Carl. Perhaps he looked more like a man who knew about scaffolding than Assad.
Carl was about to thank her. To step aside like a customs officer and wish her a safe onward journey. He was about to light up another smoke and think some more about Mona.
“But there was a car here the day before yesterday, the same time as that dreadful accident over near Lindebjerg,” the woman went on.
Carl nodded. The wheel tracks in the dirt.
Her expression changed. “There was a car chase, apparently. Two women in one of the vehicles were very badly injured. My brother-in-law’s cousin was one of the paramedics on the scene. He said it was touch and go.”