“Haven’t you read the accident report? The owner was Isabel Jønsson, but the other woman, Lisa Karin Krogh, was the one driving.”
“Yeah, I know that. Are they Church of Denmark?”
“All over the place, these questions, aren’t they?”
“I need to know. Are they?”
She gave a shrug.
“Find out for me, Rose. And if they’re not, I want you to find out what denomination they otherwise might subscribe to.”
“What am I, a journalist?”
He was just about to hit the roof but found himself interrupted by a sudden commotion of yells and cries from somewhere in the vicinity of the mail department.
“What’s going on?” Assad exclaimed.
“How should I know?” Carl snarled back. All he could see was a man standing at the other end of the corridor with the sidepiece from a steel shelving unit raised above his head, and then one of the uniformed boys leaping from the adjoining corridor to send him flying. The sidepiece came down hard in the process, and the officer fell back in a heap.
At the same moment, the man caught sight of the assembled three members of Department Q, and without hesitation he began to charge toward them wielding the piece of steel. Rose retreated, but Assad stayed put next to Carl.
“Maybe we should let the lads upstairs take care of this, Assad? Get the duty officer down?” Carl suggested, over the man’s unintelligible shouts.
But Assad didn’t answer. He braced himself, legs bent at the knee, upper body leaning forward with his arms out like a wrestler. Their prospective assailant, however, was unperturbed, a fact he would very soon come to regret. At the instant he raised his improvised weapon above his head to strike, Assad sprang into the air and grabbed it with both hands. The effect was astonishing.
The man’s arms buckled at the elbow, and Assad brought down the steel against his shoulder with such force that the crunch of breaking bone was clearly audible.
Presumably for form’s sake, Assad completed his counterstrike by delivering a firm kick to the attacker’s muscle-bound abdomen. It was not a pretty sight, and the sounds that escaped from the desperate man were of the kind a person would hope never to hear again. Carl had never seen anyone so berserk neutralized so swiftly.
While the man on the floor writhed in pain from his fractured collarbone and Assad’s pinpoint strike to his guts, uniformed officers came running.
Only then did Carl notice the handcuffs dangling from the wrist of the man’s right hand.
“We’d just brought him in from Yard 4 on his way to the Magistrates’ Court,” one of the uniformed guys said, snapping shut the handcuffs on the man’s other wrist. “God knows how he managed to get the cuffs off, but the next thing we know he’s away through the cargo hatch and on his way down to the mail department.”
“He wouldn’t have got far,” a second officer said. Carl knew him. An excellent marksman.
It was pats on the back from all around for Assad. What did they care if he had put their charge in the hospital?
“Who is he, anyway?” Carl asked.
“Seems he might be the guy who bumped off three Serbian debt collectors in the space of the last two weeks.”
And now Carl saw the ring grown into the flesh of the man’s little finger.
Carl’s eye caught Assad’s. He didn’t seem surprised in the slightest.
“I saw that,” said a voice behind Carl’s back as the officers dragged the groaning Serb back where he had come from.
Carl swiveled. It was Valde, one of the retired officers who presided over the Burial Club. Deputy chairman, as far as Carl recalled.
“What the hell are you doing here on a Wednesday, Valde? I thought you lot only met up on Tuesdays?”
Valde chortled and stroked his beard. “Well, we were all out for Jannik’s birthday yesterday. His seventieth, so you can imagine. No going soft on tradition there, I’ll tell you.”
He turned to Assad. “Bloody hell, mate. I wouldn’t mind seeing that again. Where did you pick up tricks like that?”
Assad gave a shrug. “Action and reaction. That’s all.”
Valde nodded. “Come into the parlor. You deserve a Gammel Dansk.”
“Gammel Dansk?” Assad was mystified.
“Assad doesn’t drink alcohol, Valde,” Carl explained. “He’s a Muslim. I’ll have his.”
They were all there. Mostly former traffic police, but Jannik the maintenance supervisor, too, and one of the commissioner’s old chauffeurs.
Sandwiches, cigarettes, black coffee, and Gammel Dansk. Pensioners were on a cushy number at Police HQ.
“You bearing up all right, Carl?” one of them asked. A bloke he’d sometimes had dealings with in the Gladsaxe Police District.
Carl nodded.
“Dreadful business what happened to Hardy and Anker. Very nasty case indeed. Did you ever get to the bottom of it?”
“Can’t say we did.” He turned his gaze to the window above the row of tables. “You lot don’t know you’re born, having daylight in here. We could do with some ourselves.”
The Burial Club all frowned at once.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“All the rooms down here have got windows in them,” one of them said.
“Not where we are they haven’t.”
Jannik, the maintenance supervisor, got to his feet. “I’ve been here thirty-seven years, and I know every nook and cranny in this old place. Would you be kind enough to show me this room of yours. I’ve to be getting on soon.”
So much for his Gammel Dansk.
“There you go,” Carl said a minute later. He gestured at the wall to which his flatscreen was affixed. “Where’s this window of yours, then?”
Jannik peered. “What do you call that?” He pointed straight at the wall.
“Erm, a wall?”
“It’s plasterboard, Carl. Plasterboard. My lot put it up when this place was turned into a stockroom. There were shelving units all over. Here, and further along where that cute little secretary of yours is. Same shelves the Support Unit later used to store all those helmets and visors. Same shelves that are cluttering up the bloody place now.” He laughed. “Couldn’t work it out, eh, Carl? Do you want me to knock a hole through so you can see out, or can you do it yourself?”
He could hardly credit it. “What about the other side?” He gestured toward Assad’s cubbyhole.
“That place? That’s never been an office, Carl. It’s a broom cupboard. There’s no window in there.”
“OK. I reckon Rose and I can do without, too, in that case. Maybe later, once they’ve finished clearing this place out and I find Assad another office.”
Jannik shook his head and chuckled.
“Hell of a bloody mess they’re making down here,” he said as they stood for a moment in the corridor. “What’s that there in aid of?” He pointed to what was left of the plasterboard partition, the remains of which were now lined up along the wall from Assad’s case overviews and on past Rose’s office.
“We put up a dividing wall because of those pipes there. There’s asbestos falling from them, apparently. Health and Safety kicked up a fuss.”
“What, them?” The maintenance supervisor jerked a finger at the ceiling as he turned to go back to his Gammel Dansk. “You can pull all them down if you want. The heating pipes run through the crawl space now. Those ones on the ceiling have got no use anymore.”
His laugh echoed through most of the basement.
Carl had hardly stopped swearing when Rose appeared. Maybe she’d been doing her job for once.
“They’re both alive, Carl. Lisa Karin Krogh is still critical, but the other one’s going to pull through. They’re pretty sure of that now.”
He nodded. In that case, they’d better get out there and have a word with her.
“As for their religious affiliations, Isabel Jønsson is regular Church of Denmark, and Lisa Krogh belongs to something called the Mother Church. I spoke to their neighbor in Frederiks. It seems to be a weird sect that keeps itself to itself. The neighbor woman reckoned Lisa Krogh’s husband had been dragged into it by his wife. The husband calls himself Joshua, and she goes by the name of Rachel.”