The Purity of Vengeance (42 page)

To his bewilderment he felt the rush of wind from an open window and smelled gas.

“I’ve got Jesper awake now,” someone shouted from the landing. “He’s vomiting. What should I do?”

“Turn him onto his side. Have you opened the window?” the dark figure at Carl’s side shouted back.

He felt a hard slap against his cheek, then another. “Carl, look at me. Focus. Are you OK?”

He nodded, but wasn’t sure.

“We need to get you downstairs, Carl. There’s still too much gas up here. Can you manage to walk?”

He got up slowly, staggered onto the landing, and descended the stairs unsteadily. It felt like he was falling into a hole. Not until he was sitting on a chair in front of his garden door did the blur of outlines become more distinct, enough to start making sense.

He peered up at Morten’s boyfriend, who was standing beside him.

“What the fuck?” he mumbled. “You still here? Have you moved in?”

“If he has, we should all be very grateful,” came the dry comment from Hardy’s bed.

Carl turned his head, still woozy. “What happened?”

There was a commotion as Morten lugged Jesper down the stairs. Carl’s stepson was looking even worse than he’d done the time he came home from two weeks’ partying in Kos.

Mika gestured toward the kitchen. “Someone’s been in the house. Whoever it was doesn’t like us.”

Carl got to his feet with difficulty and went to see.

He saw the gas cylinder immediately, one of the new ones made of hard plastic. It was a kind he knew he didn’t have. He used the old yellow ones for the gas barbecue; there was nothing wrong with them. And what was it doing there, anyway, with a length of rubber tubing attached to the regulator?

“Where’d that come from?” he asked, still too befuddled to remember the name of the man standing next to him.

“It wasn’t here at two this morning when I looked in on Hardy,” the guy answered.

“Hardy?”

“Yeah, he had a reaction to his treatment yesterday. Hot flushes, headaches. It’s a good sign he responds so strongly to the stimuli. Plus it almost certainly saved our lives.”

“No, you did that, Mika,” Hardy called out from his bed.

That was it, yeah. Mika.

“Explain,” Carl commanded, policeman’s instinct kicking in.

“I’ve been looking in on Hardy every two hours since yesterday evening. I’ll keep on over the next couple of days so I can observe exactly how he’s reacting. Anyway, half an hour ago my alarm went off and I woke up to a smell of gas. It was very strong in the basement and almost knocked me out when I came up here to the ground floor. I turned off the flow from the cylinder and opened all the windows, and then I noticed there was a little saucepan on the stove with smoke coming off it. When I looked closer I could see it was almost dry, apart from a little bit of olive oil in the bottom and a scorched piece of paper towel. That was where the smoke was coming from.”

He gestured toward the kitchen window. “I chucked it out as quick as I could. A moment later and the paper would have caught fire.”

 • • • 

Carl nodded to his colleague from Fire Investigation, Erling Holm. Strictly speaking this wasn’t his patch, but Carl didn’t want to get the Hillerød police involved, and Erling lived only five kilometers away in Lynge.

“Very nasty, this, Carl. Twenty, thirty seconds more and that paper towel would have burst into flame and ignited the gas. And as far as I can gauge from the weight of the cylinder, a lot had already seeped out. With that regulator and the wide-bore tubing on the nozzle it’d have taken about twenty minutes at most, I reckon.” He shook his head. “That’s why whoever did this didn’t turn the stove up full whack. He wanted the house full of gas before it all went off.”

“And we needn’t hazard a guess at the outcome, eh, Erling?”

“Put it this way. Department Q would have been advertising for a new boss.”

“Big explosion, then?”

“Yes and no. But effective, certainly. All your rooms and everything in them would have gone up in flames at once.”

“But Jesper and Hardy and I would have died from the gas before then, right?”

“Hardly. It’s not poisonous like that. Might have given you a headache, though.” He laughed. Funny buggers, these fire investigators. “You’d have burned to death in an instant, and those in the basement wouldn’t have been able to get out. The most fiendish bit is it’s by no means certain our boys would’ve been able to determine any crime had taken place. We’d most likely have localized the source of the blaze as the gas cylinder and the saucepan on the stove, but it could easily have looked like an accident. Lack of due care and attention. We see it all the time these days, now everyone’s got a barbecue. To be honest, I could imagine whoever it was getting off scot-free.”

“He bloody won’t, not if I can help it.”

“Any idea who might have done it, Carl?”

“Yeah. Someone with a pick gun. There’s a lot of little marks on the front-door lock. Apart from that, I’ve no idea.”

“Suspicions?”

“My life’s full of them.”

Carl gave his thanks and assured Erling that everyone in the house was OK before doing a quick round of the neighbors to find out if anyone had seen anything. Most of them were annoyed. Who wouldn’t be at five in the morning? But all in all, the majority seemed genuinely shocked, though no one was able to identify any suspects.

 • • • 

It took less than an hour for Vigga to turn up, her hair all over the place and a reluctant Gurkamal at her side with his turban, big white teeth, and extravagant beard.

“Oh, my God,” she gasped. “Tell me Jesper’s all right.”

“He’s fine. Puked on the sofa and all over Hardy’s bed, but apart from that he’s right as rain. First time in ages I’ve heard him say he wanted his mum, though.”

“Oh, goodness, the little dear.” Not a word as to how Carl was doing. The difference between soon-to-be ex-husband and son was obvious indeed.

He heard her fussing over her offspring in the background when the doorbell rang.

“If that’s him back with another gas cylinder, tell him we’ve still got some left in the first one,” Hardy called out from his bed. “He can come back next week instead.”

What on earth’s Mika been doing to the bloke? Carl mused, opening the door.

The girl standing in front of him was pale from lack of sleep. She had dark shadows under her eyes, a ring through her lip, and was sixteen years old at most.

“Hi,” she said. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder toward his neighbor Kenn’s house, and the way she was squirming with embarrassment she seemed almost in danger of dislocating something.

“I’m going out with Peter from over there and we’d been at a party at the youth club. I was sleeping at his house because I live in Blovstrød and there’s no buses at that time of night. We got back a few hours ago and Kenn came down to look in on us in the basement after you’d been over to ask if anyone had noticed anything strange going on around your house last night. He told us what had happened and we said we’d seen something when we got home, so Kenn wanted me to come over and tell you about it.”

Carl raised an eyebrow. Clearly, she wasn’t as dozy as she looked, with all those words coming out of her.

“OK. What did you see, then?”

“There was a man at your door when we walked past. I asked Peter if he knew him, but his mind was on other things.” She giggled.

Carl went on. “What was he like, this man? Did you get a look at him?”

“Yeah, he was standing in the light by the door. It looked like he was messing with the lock, but he didn’t turn round so I didn’t see him from the front.”

Carl felt his shoulders droop at least a couple of degrees.

“He was pretty tall, quite well built as far as I could make out, and his clothes were all dark. He was wearing a coat or a big anorak, something like that. And a black knitted beanie like Peter’s. I noticed his hair, though. Very fair hair, it was, almost white. And there was like a gas bottle of some sort on the ground at his side.”

Almost white. The information on its own was nearly enough. If Carl was right, Curt Wad’s flaxen-haired gorilla, the man they’d seen in Halsskov, was skilled at more than just driving a van.

“Thanks,” he said. “You’re very observant, and you’ve been a great help indeed. You did right, coming over.”

She squirmed with embarrassment again.

“Did you notice if he was wearing gloves, by any chance?”

“Oh, I forgot about that,” she said, momentarily suspending her physical contortions. “He was, yeah. The kind with holes at the knuckles.”

Carl nodded. In that case he needn’t bother getting the lock cylinder checked for prints. The issue was whether they could trace the rather special-looking regulator, but he doubted very much it would lead them anywhere, for there was bound to be loads of them knocking about.

“Right, if everything’s OK here, I’ll be off to HQ then,” he announced to the assembled household a moment later, only for Vigga to grab hold of his sleeve.

“Sign this before you go. There’s one copy for you, one for the regional state administration, and one for me,” she informed him, laying all three out on the kitchen counter.
Agreement on Division of Property
, it read at the top.

He read through it quickly. It was exactly as they had agreed the day before. Saved him doing it himself.

“That’s fine, Vigga. It’s all in there, I can see that. Right down to the bit about visiting your mother. I’m sure the authorities will be pleased to know you’ve given me eight weeks’ holiday in that respect. Very generous.” He laughed sarcastically and signed his name next to her own spidery hand.

“Then there’s the divorce petition,” she said, shoving another document in front of him. He signed it without hesitation.

“Thanks, lover.” She almost sniffled.

It was nice of her, but the word only made him think of Mona’s Rolf, which wasn’t the most desirable association. He was a long way off coming to terms with the hurt. Mona wasn’t just anybody. It would take an age for him to get over it.

He snorted.
Lover
. A bit over the top for a parting salute, he thought, considering how stormy their marriage had turned out.

He gave the documents to a smiling Gurkamal, who bowed before extending his hand.

“Thank you for your wife,” he said in what Carl presumed was a Sikh accent. It was a deal.

Vigga beamed. “Now that all the formalities have been dealt with, I can tell you I’m moving in with Gurkamal above his shop next week.”

“Hope it’s warmer than the last place,” Carl rejoined.

“Oh, now you mention it, I sold it yesterday for six hundred thousand. That’s a hundred thousand more than we reckoned it was worth in our agreement. I thought I might keep the change, if that’s all right with you.”

Carl was lost for words. That Gherkin of hers had certainly taught her a thing or two about business. He was quicker than a camel could shite, as Assad most likely would have put it.

 • • • 

“Good thing I bumped into you, Carl,” said Laursen, on the stairs of the rotunda back at HQ. “Come upstairs a minute, eh?”

“Actually, I was on my way up to see Marcus Jacobsen.”

“I’ve just taken him his lunch. He’s in a meeting. Everything all right?”

“Fine,” Carl replied. “Apart from the fact that it’s Monday, I just got fleeced by my soon-to-be ex, my girlfriend’s shagging someone else, we all got poisoned with gas last night, and the house nearly blew up. Add to that the trouble and strife this place is giving me, and I couldn’t be better. Even got rid of that diarrhea.”

“That’s all right, then,” said Laursen, three steps ahead of him. He’d heard fuck all.

“Listen,” he said eventually as they sat in the back room behind the kitchen, surrounded by fridges and stocks of vegetables. “There’s been a development in the nail-gun case. That photo of you and Anker together with the bloke who got done in. They’ve had various labs analyze it, and I can put your mind at rest and tell you most of them reckon it’s a digital composite, put together from various sources.

“Of course it is, that’s what I’ve been saying all along. It’s a setup. Maybe someone I wound up the wrong way once. You know how vengeful some of these bastards can be. They can sit around in prison for years, working out how to get their own back one day. Stands to reason it has to happen once in a while. But I can tell you this much: I never knew this Pete Boswell they’re trying to get me mixed up with.”

Laursen nodded. “The photo’s got no halftone dots. It’s like all the tiniest elements are all merged together. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you can’t see the join, basically. It may be several photos edited together and then photographed incrementally using a Polaroid camera, for instance, with the Polaroid image eventually being photographed with an analog camera with regular film in it and then developed. Or it might have been blurred in a digital-image editing application before being printed. They don’t know for sure. The paper itself doesn’t tell us anything either.”

“Sounds like gibberish to me.”

“Yeah, but the possibilities are endless these days. Or, more precisely, two years ago when Pete Boswell was still among the living.”

“All right, so everything’s turning out for the better, is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Laursen handed Carl a beer, which he declined. “They’ve not reached any conclusion yet, and the fact of the matter is that not
everyone
out there at the labs thinks it’s a fake. At the end of the day, what I just told you proves nothing, only that it’s all a bit suspect. But from what I’ve heard, most of them reckon someone’s done their best to make it look genuine.”

“So where does that leave me? Are they still wanting to hang me out to dry? Are you telling me there’s a suspension on its way?”

“No, it’s not that. What I’m trying to say is that all this is going to take time. But I think Terje’s the one to fill you in on it.” He gestured toward the dining area.

“Terje Ploug’s here?”

“Yeah, he comes in every day at the same time, if he’s not out and about. One of my most faithful customers, he is, so be nice to him.”