The Purity of Vengeance (16 page)

“Little of what we do within the framework of The Cause can bear the light of day in present circumstances, but you’ll be aware of that, obviously. We’ve a lot at stake.”

“Indeed.”

“Many would prefer to see a person vanish from the face of the earth rather than put up with him carrying out his work without due care and discretion.”

The man nodded. “Understandably so. I’d feel the same way, I’m sure.”

“So you’re willing to be initiated into our selection procedures with regard to pregnancy termination and sterilization?”

“I am.”

“We employ special terminology in such instances. We have lists of addresses and our own specially developed methods of abortion. If we initiate you into these procedures you will become a full-fledged member. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do. What is required before I can be approved?”

Curt scrutinized the man. Was the will present? Would these eyes remain as calm if he faced prison and disgrace? Did he have enough backbone to resist pressure from without?

“Your family and friends are to be kept in the dark, unless they take active part in our work.”

“My wife takes no interest in what I do, so there’s nothing to worry about on that account.” His guest smiled. It was just the reaction Curt had hoped for at this point in their discussion.

“Very well, let’s go into my surgery. You’ll take off your clothes and allow me to check for listening devices. After that I want you to write down some facts about yourself, things you’d want no one in the world to know besides us. No doubt you’ve a couple of skeletons in your cupboard much like the rest of us, am I right? The points in question should preferably concern your medical work.”

Here his guest nodded. Not everyone did.

“You want secrets. To be used against me if I get cold feet?”

“I’m sure you’ve got some.”

The man nodded again.

“Plenty.”

Afterward, when Curt had searched him and watched as he signed his statement, he issued the obligatory strict exhortations to loyalty and silence in respect of The Cause’s activities and fundamental principles. And when this didn’t seem to discourage the man either, Curt delivered a brief introduction to how spontaneous abortions could be provoked without giving rise to suspicion, before informing him, by way of conclusion, of the intervals required between such treatments to ensure the attention of health inspectors and the police would not be aroused.

When finally they said their good-byes, Curt was left with the splendid feeling of once again having contributed to the good of his nation.

He poured himself a brandy and sat down at the oak desk, trying to recall how many times he had performed the procedure himself.

The cases had been many. Nete Hermansen had been one.

His gaze fell once more on her letter on top of the pile. Then he closed his eyes in pleasant recollection of that very first and most memorable occasion.

13

November 2010

In the late hours
of evening on a dark November day such as this, there was something magical about the windows of Police HQ. Like eyes lit up, they seemed almost to be keeping watch. Offices were always awake somewhere in the imposing building, their occupants dwelling on cases that wouldn’t rest and couldn’t keep. This was the hour when the city bared its teeth: the streetwalker was beaten, drinking mates fell out and drew knives, gangs sought confrontation, and wallets were plundered.

Carl had spent thousands of hours in this building with the street-lamps winking while decent citizens slept in their beds, but he had to admit it had been a while ago now.

If only his evening with Mona hadn’t been so excruciating. If only he could have sat down on her bed and gazed into her gorgeous brown eyes instead. If only it had been like that, he would never have bothered to see who was calling him so late. But it hadn’t, and Assad turned out to be his savior.

And now he was stuck with the consequences. He went down the stairs to the basement and shook his head in disbelief as Rose and Assad came toward him.

“What the hell are you two doing here?” he asked, continuing along the corridor without stopping. “You do realize you’ve been here for nineteen hours now, Assad?”

He glanced over his shoulder. Rose’s traipsing feet behind him didn’t exactly sound like she was full of beans. “And what about you, Rose? How come you’re still here? Scraping up overtime for a day off, is that it?” He threw his coat over the chair in his office. “Something new in the Rita Nielsen case that can’t wait till tomorrow?”

Assad raised his bushy eyebrows sufficiently for the redness of his eyes to give Carl a start. “Here are the newspapers we have examined,” he said, dumping a pile onto Carl’s desk.

“Only we haven’t had that close a look,” Rose added.

Knowing Rose, this was a rather modest statement. He noted the grin on Assad’s face. They’d almost certainly pored through the pages until the paper had worn thin. Of course they had. First the missing persons department’s files of all reported cases in September 1987, then the newspapers. He knew perfectly well how they operated.

“There’s nothing in that period to suggest any kind of trouble on the drugs scene or other episodes that could be linked to rape or anything similar in the area,” Rose said.

“Anyone considered the possibility of Rita Nielsen having left the car somewhere else, and that it wasn’t her who parked it on Kapelvej?” Carl asked. “Maybe we shouldn’t be looking at Copenhagen at all. If she didn’t park the car herself, she could have disappeared anywhere at all between here and the Storebælt ferry.”

“They already thought of that,” Rose replied. “The thing is, though, that according to the police report, the kiosk owner in Nørrebro remembered her when they turned up to ask about her credit card transaction. So she
was
in Nørrebro that morning.”

Carl pressed his lips together. “Why did she leave home so early? Have you thought about that?” he asked.

Assad nodded. “Definitely because she had an appointment, I think.”

Carl agreed. The time of her departure had been bothering him. No one leaves home at five in the morning without good reason, certainly no one of Rita Nielsen’s profession, which was mostly conducted during the night. And it was hardly likely to do with Saturday shopping hours either, so what explanation could there be, other than she had an appointment to keep?

“Either someone met her when she got to Copenhagen, in which case whoever it was knows more about her disappearance than we do, or else she never arrived, in which case someone must have realized as much,” Carl said. “What sort of an effort was made to find her? Was it enough, do you reckon?”

“Enough?” Assad looked at Rose, who seemed just as blank. The pair of them had obviously run out of blood sugar.

“Yeah, enough for anyone who’d been in touch with her, or was supposed to have been, to have known about her disappearance,” said Rose.

“But listen, Carl,” she went on, “police spent three days going from door to door. It was in all the papers. The call was put out on TV and on local and national radio, and not a soul came forward, other than that kiosk owner.”

“So you reckon someone knew about her going missing, but kept it to themselves? And whoever knew about it might have been involved in her disappearance, is that right?”

Rose smacked her heels together and saluted. “Indeed, sir.”

“And now the two of you are telling me there was an unusual number of missing persons reported at about the same time and that none of them have ever been found, is that right, Assad?”

“Yes, and now we have one more who was never found,” Assad replied. “We have asked for a whole more week of newspapers, just to be certain we are not missing something that is not on the lists we have from the police districts.”

Carl pondered Assad’s information for a moment. “So now we’ve got a total of, what, five persons, including Rita Nielsen, who’ve never turned up? Five people in two weeks, vanished without a trace, is that what you’re saying?”

“Bull’s-eye. In the country as a whole there were fifty-five persons reported missing during the two weeks we’ve been concentrating on, and ten months later five still hadn’t been found. And they still haven’t, twenty-three years on,” Rose said with a nod. “I’d say that must be a record, so many disappearances in such a few days.”

Carl tried to assess the dark shadows under her eyes. Was it fa-
tigue, or had her mascara simply been redistributed during the course of the day?

“Let’s have a look,” he said, running his finger down Rose’s list.

He got out a pen and crossed out one of the names. “We can forget about her, at any rate,” he said, indicating the woman’s age and the circumstances of her disappearance.

“Yes, we think she is too old,” said Assad. “And this I say even though my father’s sister is older by two years, eighty-five this Christmas, and still she chops firewood all day long.”

What a lot of bollocks about nothing, Carl thought to himself. “Listen, Assad! This woman here was senile. She went missing from her care home, and I’m sure she didn’t chop firewood, OK? What about the others on the list? Have you checked them out? Is there anything that might connect them with Rita Nielsen’s disappearance?”

Here they grinned. Like a pair of bleeding kids.

“Come on, then, let’s have it.”

Assad gave Rose a nudge with his elbow.

“There’s this lawyer by the name of Philip Nørvig from a law firm called Nørvig and Sønderskov in Korsør,” she began. “The day before his teenage daughter’s most important handball match of the year, Nørvig told her she’d have to take her mother along instead of him, despite the fact he’d promised to be there. All he said by way of explanation was that he had an important meeting in Copenhagen that couldn’t be put off.”

“And then he disappeared?”

“Yeah, he took the train from Halsskov later that same morning and would have got in to Copenhagen Central about nine thirty. After that, nothing. Vanished off the face of the earth.”

“Anyone see him get off the train?”

“A couple of other passengers from Korsør recognized him. He was involved in quite a number of associations in the town, so a lot of people knew who he was.”

“I think I remember now,” said Carl, ignoring the snot he felt sliding lazily down his nostril. “Prominent lawyer in Korsør. Fairly big thing in the papers at the time. Didn’t he turn up floating around in one of the canals here in Copenhagen?”

“No, he disappeared totally, Carl,” said Assad. “You must be thinking of another man.”

“Was that case up on our bulletin board already, Assad?”

Assad nodded. In which case a length of red string most likely now connected it to the Rita Nielsen case.

“You’ve got something about it on that sheet there, I see. What’s it say about this Nørvig bloke, Rose?”

“He was born in 1925 . . .” was as far as she got.

“In 1925? Bloody hell!” Carl blurted out. “He must have been in his early sixties in 1987. Pretty old for the father of a teenage handball player.”

“How about listening to the rest before butting in?” said Rose wearily. The way her eyes were beginning to blink, she reminded him of an aging female rock star trying to come on sexy from beneath a boatload of mascara. Any minute now she’d probably fall asleep.

“Born in 1925,” she repeated. “Law degree from Århus in 1950. Junior lawyer with Laursen and Bonde in Vallensbæk, 1950 to 1954. Set up his own firm in Korsør in 1954, right to plead before the High Court in 1965. Married to Sara Julie Enevoldsen, 1950. Divorced, 1973. Two children by first marriage. Married his secretary, Mie Hansen, 1974. One child by her, a daughter by the name of Cecilie, born the same year.”

She looked up, a suggestive expression on her face. There was the explanation for his late fatherhood. The bloke had knocked up his secretary. Philip Nørvig seemed to be a man who knew what he wanted.

“He stood for chairman of the local association of sports clubs and was voted in for three terms. After a while he joined the parish council, too. Until 1982, when he got forced out because of accusations of fraud in his law firm. He had to go to court, but got off due to lack of evidence. Still lost a lot of clients, though, and by the time he disappeared five years later, he’d had his driving license revoked because of a drunk driving conviction. Financially, he’d gone down the drain as well. It was all in the red.”

“Hmmm.” Carl thrust out his lower lip and felt the urge for a smoke. A ciggie would do the world of good for his ailing health
and
his powers of concentration.

“Hey, don’t you be lighting up now, Carl,” Rose said.

Carl stared at her in astonishment. How the . . . ?

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Rose.” He cleared his throat. It had started to itch. “You got any tea in that urn of yours, Assad?”

His assistant’s brown eyes lit up for a moment, only to be extinguished again. “I’m afraid not, Carl. But I can offer you a good cup of coffee. What do you say?”

Carl swallowed. Assad’s coffee was enough to put the wind up any virus.

“As long as it’s not too strong, Assad,” he replied with an imploring look. Last time it had cost him half a toilet roll. He didn’t want that again.

“So the only thing connecting the two cases is that both individuals disappeared under pretty much the same circumstances,” he reasoned. “Both were going to Copenhagen that day. We don’t know why Rita Nielsen was, but Nørvig said he had a meeting. It’s not much to go on, Rose.”

“You’re forgetting the time, Carl. They disappeared on the same day and almost at the exact same time. That’s what
I
call weird.”

“I’m still not convinced. What about the other two cases on the list?”

She looked down at the sheet of paper in her hands. “There’s a Viggo Mogensen who we don’t know anything about. He just vanished. Last seen down by the harbor in Lundeborg, setting out over the Storebælt in his little boat.”

“Was he a fisherman?”

“Don’t think so. It was just a little boat he had. He did have a fishing boat at one point, but it was broken up. Probably on account of all that EU fishing quota crap.”