The Purity of Vengeance (22 page)

“OK, then I’ll get to the point. Can I speak to you in confidence? What I mean is that Rose mustn’t know I’m calling until I tell her personally.”

“No can do!”

“You mean, you’ll tell Rose I rang? I’d much rather you didn’t.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. We don’t see Rose at all these days. But I’ll tell the others. We’ve no secrets from each other.”

This was weird. Utterly off the map.

“Oh, I see! Then I’ll just ask you, then. Has Rose ever suffered from psychiatric problems? A personality disorder, perhaps? Has she ever undergone treatment for anything like that?”

“Well, I don’t know if you’d call it treatment, but she guzzled most of the pills our mother was prescribed when our dad died. Not to mention getting out of her head on weed, snorting her brains out on various substances, and boozing herself up to the eyeballs. So in a way you could say she’s been on medication, I suppose. Don’t know if it’s helped much, though.”

“Helped in respect of what?”

“In respect of her not wanting to be Rose anymore when she was down. She wanted to be one of us instead, or someone else altogether.”

“So what you’re actually saying is she’s not well, right?”

“Not well? I wouldn’t know, to be honest. What I do know is she’s off her rocker.”

This, at least, came as no surprise. “Has she always been like this?”

“As long as I can remember, yeah. Only it got worse after our dad died.”

“I understand. Any particular reason? I’m sorry, that sounds wrong doesn’t it? What I meant was, were there any unusual circumstances surrounding your father’s death?”

“Yes, there were. He was killed in an accident at work. He got pulled into a machine. They had to gather him up in pieces in a tarpaulin. Apparently when the ambulance crew dropped him off for the postmortem, all they said was: ‘See if you can put this back together.’”

She spoke with surprising coolness. Cynically, almost.

“I’m sorry to hear it. Sounds like a dreadful way to die. I can see how that must have affected you all very deeply indeed. But Rose lost her grip, is that what you’re saying?”

“She had a summer office job at the steelworks in Frederiksværk where our dad worked. She saw them drag him out. So, yeah, Rose was the one who lost her grip.”

It was a terrible story. Who wouldn’t have cracked up?

“All of a sudden she just didn’t want to be Rose anymore. It’s as simple as that. One day she was a punk, the next an elegant lady, or one of us sisters. I don’t know if I’d call her ill, but Lise-Marie, Vicky, and I don’t want to be with her when she keeps changing into one of us. I’m sure you can understand that.”

“Why do you think it’s affected her like this?”

“Like I said before, she’s off her rocker. You must have realized that, seeing as how you’re calling.”

Carl nodded. Rose wasn’t the only one in her family with keen powers of deduction.

“One last thing, just to satisfy my curiosity. Is your hair blonde and curly? And do you like pink and wear pleated skirts?”

There was an eruption of laughter at the other end. “You mean she’s already done that one on you? The blonde hair and curls is right enough. The pink, too, for that matter. I’m wearing pink nail polish and lipstick right now, as a matter of fact. But I definitely haven’t worn the pleated skirt for years.”

“A tartan pleated skirt?”

“That’s it, yeah. It was all the rage around the time I got confirmed.”

“If you have a look through your wardrobe or wherever you might have put it last, Yrsa, I think you’ll discover you no longer have full possession of that skirt.”

After he’d hung up he sat for a while with a smile on his face. He didn’t know much about these sisters, but he reckoned he and Assad could deal with them if suddenly they happened to turn up looking suspiciously like their Rose.

 • • • 

The Tivoli Hall was indeed situated on the corner opposite the Rio Bravo, but a hall it was not. Not unless you could call a low-ceilinged cellar a hall.

Carl’s cousin sat toward the back of the room in comfortable proximity to the men’s toilets. Once Ronny planted himself in a place like this, he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry apart from the gents, so his bladder could keep abreast of activities at the other end of his all-consuming anatomy.

Ronny waved his hand in the air, as if Carl wouldn’t be able to recognize him. He was looking older and had put on weight, but other than that he regrettably didn’t seem to have changed a bit. His hair was Brylcreemed into a quiff of sorts, though hardly rock ’n’ roll, more like a has-been crooner in an Argentinian soap for yearning suburban housewives. Vigga would have called him vulgar. Kitted out in a tight-woven, shiny mafioso jacket and a pair of jeans that fitted neither the rest of his getup nor Ronny’s fat-arsed, skinny-legged frame. It all might have seemed becoming had he been a flirtatious signorina from Napoli, but he was Ronny. Right down to his winklepicker shoes. It was pathetic.

“I’ve already ordered,” Ronny announced, indicating two empty beer bottles.

“I’m assuming one of them was mine,” Carl ventured, only for Ronny to shake his head.

“Two more,” he called out, then leaned toward Carl.

“Nice to see you again, cuz.” He reached out to clasp Carl’s hands, but Carl pulled them away in time. It gave a couple of the other clients something to talk about.

He looked his cousin in the eye before condensing into two sentences Børge Bak’s claims about Ronny’s mouthing off in a Bangkok bar.

“So what?” was his only response. He wasn’t even denying it.

“You drink too much, Ronny. Do you want me to put a word in for you, get you into rehab? Not that I’d pay, you understand, but if you keep on making noises in public about bumping off your dad and me being in on it, you might just end up getting colonic irrigation for free in one of those nice prisons the courts will make available for you.”

“Bollocks, that case lapsed years ago.” Ronny flashed a smile to the woman who appeared with two more bottles and a plate of food. He’d ordered dried cod.

Carl cast a glance at the menu. Ronny’s fish cost a hundred and ninety-five kroner. Probably the most expensive dish they had, but he was going to pay for it himself if Carl had any say in the matter.

“Thanks, but the beer’s not for me,” said Carl, shoving the two bottles across the table to his cousin. No doubt now about who was to pick up the tab.

“And there’s no time-bar on murder cases in Denmark,” he continued drily, ignoring the start the waitress gave on hearing his words.

“Listen, mate,” said Ronny, once they were alone again. “No one can prove anything, so lighten up. The old man was a bastard. He may have been nice to you, but he wasn’t to me, in case you didn’t know. Those fishing trips were just a smoke screen to impress your dad. Truth was, he couldn’t be arsed. As soon as we buggered off up the road to those girls, he was going to get himself comfy in his camping chair with his ciggies and a dram, and the fish could kiss his backside. Most of those he ‘caught’ were ones he’d brought with him. Didn’t you suss that out?”

Carl shook his head. It didn’t at all fit his image of the man his father had been so fond of, and from whom Carl had learned so much.

“Not true, Ronny. The fish that day were fresh, and your dad hadn’t touched a drop. The autopsy was very clear about that. So why all the crap?”

Ronny raised his eyebrows and finished chewing before answering. “You were just a big kid at the time, Carl. You only saw what you wanted to see. And the way I look at it now, you’re still a kid. If you don’t want to hear the truth, you can pay the bill and sod off.”

“So tell me, then. Tell me how you killed your dad and how I was mixed up in it.”

“All you have to do is think of all those posters in your bedroom.”

What kind of fucking answer was that? “What posters?”

Ronny laughed. “Funny
I
should remember, when you’ve forgotten.”

Carl took a deep breath. All that supping had obviously addled the man’s brains.

“Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Chuck Norris.” He executed a couple of karate chops in the air. “Pow! Pow!
Way of the Dragon. Enter the Dragon. Fist of Fury
.
Those
posters, Carl.”

“The kung fu posters? I only had them a short while, and I’d taken them down again
long
before then. What are you getting at, anyway?”

“JEET KUNE DO-ooo!” Ronny burst out suddenly, spraying chewed-up cod all over the table and causing the other guests to almost choke on their lager. “That was your battle cry, Carl. Aalborg, Hjørring, Frederikshavn, Nørresundby. If there was a Bruce Lee film on in any of those places, you’d be there. You can’t have forgotten, surely? As soon as you weren’t underage anymore you were there at the front of the queue. So it can’t have been
that
long before. As far as I’m aware, the age limit’s sixteen, and you were seventeen when the old man died.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Ronny? What’s this got to do with anything?”

His cousin leaned across the table again. “You taught me kung fu, Carl. And as soon as you eyeballed those girls up on the road, you saw fuck all else. That’s when I gave him a chop to the throat. Not hard, but hard enough to break a bloke’s neck, just like you showed me. I’d been practicing on the sheep at home, so I just aimed at his jugular and let him have it. Followed up with a heel kick and finished him off. Just like that!”

Carl saw the tablecloth jerk. The moron was even going to demonstrate.

“All right, no need to draw a picture. And I’d rather not have you spitting your lunch all over my clothes, if you don’t mind,” he said. “But do you know what, Ronny? There’s not a shred of truth in any of what you just told me, so why are you spouting such shite? I told your dad we’d catch him later, and then you and me went off together. Are you so traumatized by his death that you need to fabricate a pack of lies just to go on living? It’s sad, that’s what it is.”

Ronny smiled. “Believe what you want. You up for dessert?”

Carl shook his head. “If I ever hear you going on about your dad’s accident like this again, I’ll give you ‘Jeet Kune Do,’ or whatever he calls himself, are you with me?”

And with that he got up and left his cousin with the remains of his fish and most likely some serious considerations as to how he was going to get out of paying the bill.

No doubt he’d already gone off the dessert.

 • • • 

“Marcus Jacobsen wants to see you, pronto,” said the duty officer when he got back.

If I’m in for a bollocking now, I’ll give him one, too, he thought to himself as he went up the stairs.

“I’ll get right to the point,” said Marcus, even before Carl had closed the door behind him. “And I want you to answer me straight. Do you know anyone by the name of Pete Boswell?”

Carl frowned. “Never heard of him,” he replied.

“We’ve received an anonymous tip-off this afternoon about that body out in Amager.”

“I hate anonymous tip-offs. What’s the score, then?”

“Seems the victim’s a Brit. Pete Boswell, twenty-nine years old, Jamaican origins. Disappeared in autumn 2006. Registered as staying at the Hotel Triton at the time, employed by a trading company calling itself Kandaloo Workshop, dealing in Indian, Indonesian, and Malaysian artifacts and furniture. Ring any bells?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Odd, then, wouldn’t you say, that our anonymous friend says you, Anker Henningsen, and this Pete Boswell had a meeting the day he disappeared?”

“A meeting?” Carl felt the furrows tighten on his brow. “Why the hell would I have a meeting with someone who imports furniture and bric-a-brac? I’ve had the same furniture ever since I moved into the house in Allerød. I can’t
afford
new furniture, and what I need I get from IKEA like everyone else. What the fuck’s this about, Marcus?”

“You may well ask. But let’s wait and see, shall we? Anonymous calls of this nature are rarely one-off occurrences,” said Jacobsen.

Not a word about Carl barging in on his briefing earlier on.

18

August 1987

Gitte Charles was like
a painting that had once delighted its creator, but which had now been discarded, stuffed away in a corner of some junk shop with the signature obliterated by time. Up in Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands her name alone had been enough to make her feel special, and in adolescence she had promised herself that if ever a suitor should enter her life and marriage ensue, she would not give up her name. The child they called Gitte Charles was a rugged, swaggering girl who remained a mainstay in Gitte’s memory. The time since wasn’t worth talking about.

When a father goes bankrupt and abandons his family, the world of a child goes to pieces and grand designs diminish. And so it was for Gitte, her mother, and her younger brother.

Back in Denmark, in Vejle, they found a secure, albeit less favorable, substitute for their former home, a flat with no view of the sea or water of any kind, and before long the family comprised three members striving in different directions and with little interest in one another’s lives. She had not seen her mother or her brother since she was sixteen, thirty-seven years ago now, and it was a fact with which she was perfectly content.

Thank God they’ve no idea how seedy my life has become, Gitte thought to herself, taking a deep drag on her cigarette. She’d had nothing alcoholic to drink since Monday and it was driving her up the wall. Not because she was dependent. She wasn’t, not at all. But the kick, the blast it gave her brain, the sharp bite on the tongue and in the back of the throat somehow raised her out of the void. If there were funds in her account, which there weren’t, it being the end of the month, then a bottle of gin could work miracles for a couple of days. It took no more than that, so she wasn’t an alcoholic. She was just a bit down, that’s all.

She thought about cycling to Tranebjerg to see if there might be anyone left who could remember her for doing good when she was with the community home-health care. Maybe she could wangle a cup of coffee and a glass of cherry wine. There could be liqueur or tawny port.