“Just give me a minute,” said Rose, when she had finished the call.
She gazed emptily into space, as though it were the first time she had seen the world’s dark underbelly, and now she never wanted to again.
She stood for quite some time, immersed in her own thoughts as tears welled in her eyes. Carl found himself willing his watch to tick slower.
She swallowed a couple of times. “OK, I’m ready,” she said eventually. “The kidnapper has Josef’s brother and sister. Samuel and Magdalena. They were abducted on Saturday, and their mother and father were trying to get a ransom together. Isabel Jønsson wanted to help them, though Josef wasn’t quite sure how she came into the picture. She only appeared on Monday. That was all he knew. His parents didn’t tell him much.”
“What about the kidnapper?”
“Josef described the man just like he is on the police sketch. Forty-plus, perhaps a little taller than average. Nothing characteristic about the way he walks or anything like that. Josef reckons he dyes his hair and eyebrows and that he probably knows all sorts of stuff about theological issues.” She stared into space again. “If I ever get my hands on that animal, I’ll…” The sentence tapered off. Her face said it all.
Who was with the children now, Carl wanted to know.
“Someone from their church.”
“How did Josef take his mother’s death?”
She waved a hand in front of her face. She didn’t want to talk about it. Not yet, anyway.
“And he said the man couldn’t sing,” she went on, her black-painted lips quivering. “He’d heard him sing at their prayer meetings, and he was no good at it. He drove a van. Not a diesel, I asked about that. At least, it didn’t sound like a diesel engine, is what he said. A light-blue van, nondescript. He didn’t know the registration or what make it was. He’s not into cars.”
“Was that the lot?”
“The man calls himself Lars Sørensen, but Josef remembered calling him by name once to get his attention and it was like there was no reaction at first, so he reckons his proper name is something else.”
Carl wrote it down on his pad.
“What about that scar?”
“He hadn’t noticed any.” She pressed her lips together. “So it can’t be that visible.”
“Anything else?”
She shook her head. Her eyes told how sad she was.
“Thanks, Rose. See you tomorrow. You can go home now.”
Rose nodded but stayed put. She probably needed more time to get herself together.
He turned to Assad. “Only our patient in there can help us now, Assad.”
They stepped quietly into the room. Karsten Jønsson was speaking softly to his sister. A nurse busied herself with something at Isabel’s wrist. The beeping from the panel above her bed indicated her heart rate was normal and that she had now calmed down.
Carl’s gaze fell on the bed next to Isabel’s. A white sheet with a shape underneath. Not a loving mother of five, a woman who had died in terrible grief. Just a shape beneath a sheet. A split second in a hurtling car, and here she lay. Everything gone.
“May we step closer?” he asked Karsten Jønsson.
The man nodded. “Isabel wants to talk, but we’re having difficulty understanding what she’s trying to say. A pointing board’s no use at the moment, so the nurse is trying to loosen the bandages around the fingers of her right hand. Isabel has fractures in both forearms and several fingers, so she might not be able to hold a pencil at all.”
Carl looked over the figure lying in front of him in the bed. Her chin was the same as her brother’s, but otherwise there was no way to tell what this battered person might look like.
“Hello, Isabel. I’m Detective Inspector Carl Mørck, Department Q, Copenhagen Police. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Mmmmm,” came the response, and the nurse nodded.
“Let me just explain to you briefly why I’m here, Isabel.” He told her about the message in the bottle and about the other kidnappings, and that he now knew that this was a case of the same kind. Everyone in the room noted how the monitors showed her reaction to what he was saying.
“I’m sorry you have to listen to all this, Isabel. I know you’re not feeling too good as it is, but I’m afraid there’s no getting around it. Am I right in believing that you and Lisa Krogh are involved in a case like the one with the message in the bottle I just told you about?”
She nodded faintly and made sounds she needed to repeat more than once before her brother straightened his back and looked up. “I think she’s saying the woman’s name is Rachel.”
“That’s right,” said Carl. “She took another name for use in her community. We’re aware of that.”
Isabel responded with a slight nod.
“Am I right in thinking that on Monday you and Rachel were involved in an attempt to save Rachel’s two children, Samuel and Magdalena, and that the car crash you were involved in occurred during this attempt?”
Isabel’s lips quivered. Then another faint nod.
“We’re going to put a pencil in your hand now, Isabel. Your brother’s right here if you need help.” The nurse encouraged her to grasp the pencil, but Isabel’s fingers would not obey.
The nurse glanced up at Carl and shook her head.
“This isn’t going to work,” said her brother.
“Let me try,” said Assad from the rear of the room and stepped forward.
“My father was struck by aphasia when I was ten years old. There was a clot, and all his words were gone. I was the only one who could understand him after that, until the day he died.”
Carl frowned. So the man Assad had been talking to on Skype the other morning hadn’t been his father.
The nurse gave up her chair to Assad.
“Yes, I’m sorry, Isabel. My name is Assad and I am from Syria. I am Carl Mørck’s assistant, and now we shall speak together. Carl will speak and I will listen to your mouth, OK?”
A tiny nod of her head.
“What kind of car was it that ran you off the road?” Carl asked. “Did you see the make or the color? Was it old or new?”
Assad put his ear to Isabel’s mouth. His eyes were wide and lively as he listened to each and every breath that passed over her lips.
“A Mercedes. Dark. Rather old,” he repeated.
“Do you remember the registration number, Isabel?” Carl asked.
If she could, there was hope.
“Dirty number plates. She could hardly see in the dark,” Assad said after a while. “The last three digits may have been 433, though Isabel is not certain they were threes. They could have been eights, or both.”
Carl ran it through in his mind. 433, 438, 483, 488. Only four combinations. That narrowed things down.
“You got that, Karsten?” he said. “Older Mercedes, dark in color, registration ending 433, 438, 483, or 488. That’d be your department.”
Karsten Jønsson nodded. “Well, we can find out pretty quickly how many Mercedes there are on the roads with those final digits, but we still haven’t got a color. And Mercedes is a fairly common make, so there could be quite a few with that combination.”
He was right. Finding the cars was one thing, checking out their owners was quite another. It would take a lot more time than they had.
“Is there anything else you can tell us that might help, Isabel? A name, perhaps?”
She nodded again. Now it took longer for her to speak, and getting her words out required obvious effort. More than once, they heard Assad encourage her to repeat what she said.
Then came the names. Three in alclass="underline" Mads Christian Fog, Lars Sørensen, Mikkel Laust. Added to the fourth, Freddy Brink, which they knew from the Poul Holt case, and the fifth, Birger Sloth, from the Madsen case, that made a total of eleven first and last names. Not promising.