A Conspiracy of Faith Read online

  A

  CONSPIRACY

  OF

  FAITH

  ALSO BY JUSSI ADLER-OLSEN

  The Keeper of Lost Causes

  The Absent One

  A

  CONSPIRACY

  OF

  FAITH

  A Department Q Novel

  Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Translated by Martin Aitken

  DUTTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

  Copyright © 2013 by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Martin Aitken

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  has been applied for.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-62421-0

  Designed by Alissa Amell

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedicated to my son, Kes

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  It was the third morning, and the smell of tar and seaweed had got into his clothes. Under the boathouse floor, the mush of ice lapped soundlessly against the wooden stilts and awakened memories of days when everything had been all right.

  He lifted his upper body from the bedding of wastepaper and pulled himself sufficiently upright to make out his younger brother’s face, which even in sleep seemed tormented, chilled to the bone.

  Soon, he would wake and glance around in panic. He would feel the leather straps tight on his wrists and waist and hear the jangle of the chain that constrained him. He would see the snowstorm and the light as it struggled to penetrate the tarred timber planks. And then he would start to pray.

  Countless times he’d seen desperation in his brother’s eyes. Through the gaffer tape that covered his mouth came the repeated sound of his muffled pleas that Jehovah have mercy upon them.

  Yet both of them knew that Jehovah no longer paid heed, for blood had passed their lips. Blood that their jailer had let drip into their cups. The cups from which he had allowed them to drink before revealing to them what they had contained. They had drunk water, but in the water was blood, so forbidden, and now they were damned forever. And for that reason, shame pierced deeper even than thirst.

  What do you think he’ll do to us? his brother’s frightened eyes seemed to ask. But how could he ever know the answer? All he knew, instinctively, was that it would all soon be over.

  He leaned back and scanned the room once again in the dim light, allowing his gaze to pass across the collar beams and through the formations of cobwebs, noting each and every projection, each and every knot. The worn paddles and oars that hung from the apex of the ceiling. The rotten fishing nets that had long since made their last catch.

  And then he discovered the bottle. A gleam of sunlight played momentarily on the blue-white glass to dazzle him.

  So near, and yet so hard to reach. It was just behind him, wedged between the thick, rough-hewn planks of the floor.

  He stuck his fingers through the gap and tried to prize the bottle upward by the neck, but the air froze upon his skin. When the thing came loose, he would smash it and use the shards to cut through the strap that kept his hands tied tight together behind his back. And when it succumbed, his numb fingers would find the buckle at his spine. He would loosen it, tear the tape from his mouth, remove the straps from around his waist and thighs, and as soon as the chain that was fastened to the leather strap at his waist no longer held him back, he would lunge forward and free his brother. He would draw him toward him and hold him tight until their bodies ceased to tremble.

  Then, he imagined, he would use all his strength to gouge into the timber around the door with the broken glass. He would see if he could hollow out the planks to which the hinges were fixed. And if the worst should happen and the car came before he was finished, he would lie in wait for the man. He would stand poised behind the door with the broken glass in his hand. That was what he told himself he would do.

  He leaned forward, folded his freezing fingers behind his back and prayed for forgiveness for his wicked thought.

  Then he scraped again in the space between the planks to try to free the bottle. He scraped and scratched until the neck angled enough for him to grab hold of it.

  He listened.

  Was that an engine? Yes, it was. The powerful engine of a large car. But was it approaching or simply passing by in the distance out there?

  For a moment, the low, deep sound seemed to get louder. He began to pull so desperately at the neck of the bottle that his knuckles cracked audibly. But then the sound died away. Had it been the wind turbines, rumbling and whirring? Maybe it was something else entirely. He had no idea.

  He expelled warm breath from his nostrils. It steamed the air around his face. He wasn’t so afraid anymore, not now. As long as he thought about the grace of Jehovah, he felt better.

  He pressed his lips together and labored on. And when finally the bottle came free, he struck it so hard against the timber of the floor that his brother lifted his head with a startled jolt and looked around in terror.

  Again and again he brought the bottle down against the floor. It was hard to get purchase with his hands behind his back. Too hard. Eventually, when his fingers were no longer able to maintain their grip, he let the bottle slide from his hand, turned himself around, and stared emptily at it as dust gently descended from the beams through the cramped space.

  He couldn’t break it. He simply wasn’t able. A pathetic little bottle. Was it because they had drunk blood? Had Jehovah abandoned them?

  He looked at his brother, who rolled himself slowly into his blanket and fell back onto his bedding. He was silent, not even attempting to mumble a word through the tape that sealed his lips.

  It took a while to gather the
things he needed. The hardest part was stretching himself, confined by his chain, to reach the tar between the roofing planks with the tips of his fingers. Everything else was at hand: the bottle, the sharp sliver of wood from the timbered floor, the paper on which he was sitting.

  He pushed off one of his shoes and stabbed so sharply at his wrist with the wood that tears welled in his eyes. He let the blood drip onto his polished shoe for a minute, perhaps two. Then he tore a large shred of paper from his bedding, dipped the splinter in his blood, and twisted his body, pulling at his chain until he was able to see what he was writing behind his back. As best he could, and in the smallest handwriting, he put down in words what was happening to them. When he had finished, he signed the letter with his name, rolled up the paper, and stuffed it inside the bottle.

  He allowed himself plenty of time to press the lump of tar down into the neck. He shifted his weight so as to see better, and checked and double-checked to make sure it was well done.

  When finally there was no more to do, he heard the dull sound of a car engine. This time there was no mistake. He cast a pained glance at his little brother and stretched with all his might toward the light that seeped in through a broad crack in the timbered wall, the only opening through which the bottle would be able to pass.

  Then the door was opened and a thick shadow entered amid a flurry of white snow.

  Silence.

  And then the plop.

  The bottle was released.

  1

  Carl had woken up to better prospects.

  The first thing he registered was the fountain of acid bubbling in his esophagus. Then, after opening his eyes to see if there was anything that might assuage his discomfort, the sight of a woman’s wrecked and slightly drooling face on the pillow next to him.

  Oh, shit, that’s Sysser, he realized in horror, and tried to recall what mistakes he might have made the previous evening that could have led him to this. Sysser of all people. His chain-smoking neighbor. The chattering odd-job woman soon to be pensioned off from Allerød Town Hall.

  A dreadful thought struck him. Gingerly, he lifted the duvet only to discover with a sigh of relief that he still had his boxer shorts on. That was something, at least.

  “Christ,” he groaned, removing Sysser’s sinewy hand from his chest. He hadn’t had a head on him like this since he’d been with Vigga.

  “Please, spare me the details,” he said, encountering Morten and Jesper in the kitchen. “Just tell me what the lady upstairs is doing on my pillow.”

  “She’s heavier than she looks, the old bag,” his stepson offered, raising a freshly opened carton of juice to his lips. The day Jesper would discover how to pour the stuff into a glass was something not even Nostradamus would hazard a guess at.

  “Yeah, sorry, Carl,” said Morten. “She couldn’t find her key, you see, and you’d already crashed, so I reckoned…”

  Definitely the last time anyone catches me at one of Morten’s barbecues, Carl promised himself, and cast a glance into the front room where Hardy’s bed was.

  Since his former colleague had been moved in a fortnight ago, all semblance of domestic familiarity had gone down the drain. Not because the elevation bed occupied a quarter of the floor space and blocked the view of the garden. Not because IV bags dangling from stands or filled urine bags made Carl queasy in any way. And not even because Hardy’s utterly paralyzed body emitted an unceasing flow of foul-smelling gases. What changed everything was the guilty conscience all this gave rise to. Because Carl himself possessed full control of his limbs and could chug around on them whenever it suited him. And moreover, he felt he had to compensate for it all the time. To be there for Hardy. To do good for this helpless man.

  “No need to have a cow about it,” Hardy had said a couple of months back, preempting Carl as they discussed the pros and cons of moving him away from the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries at Hornbæk. “A week can go by here without me seeing you. I reckon I can do without your tender loving care a few hours at a time if I move in with you, don’t you?”

  The thing was, though, that Hardy could be peacefully asleep, like now, and yet still be so present. In Carl’s mind. In the planning of his day. In all the words that had to be weighed before being uttered. It was tiring, a bind. And a home wasn’t meant to fatigue.

  Then there was the practical side of things. Laundry, changing the sheets, manhandling Hardy’s enormous frame, shopping, liasing with nurses and authorities, cooking. So what if Morten did take care of all that? What about the rest of it?

  “Sleep well, old mate?” he ventured as he approached the bed.

  His former colleague opened his eyes and forced a smile. “That’s it then, eh, Carl? Leave of absence over and back to the treadmill. A fortnight gone in a flash. Didn’t half go quick. Morten and I will do all right. Just say hello to the crew for me, eh?”

  Carl nodded. Who would want to be Hardy? If only he could change places with someone for a day.

  Apart from the usual lot at the duty desk, Carl didn’t meet a soul on his way in. Police Headquarters felt like it had been wiped out, the colonnade winter gray and discouraging.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he called out as he entered the basement corridor.

  He’d been expecting a raucous welcome, or at least the stench of Assad’s peppermint goo or Rose’s whistled versions of the great classics, but the place was dead. Had they abandoned ship during the fortnight’s leave he’d taken to get Hardy moved in?

  He stepped into Assad’s cubbyhole and glanced around in bewilderment. No photos of aging aunts, no prayer mat, no boxes of sickly sweet cakes. Even the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling were switched off.

  He crossed the corridor and turned on the light in his own office. The familiar surroundings in which he had solved three cases and given up on two. The place the smoking ban had yet to reach, and where all the old files that made up Department Q’s domain had lain safe and sound on his desk in three neatly ordered piles, according to Carl’s own infallible system.

  He stopped dead at the sight of a wholly unrecognizable, gleaming desk. Not a speck of dust. Not a scrap of paper. Not a single closely written sheet of A4 on which he might rest his weary feet and thereafter dispatch into the wastepaper basket. No files. Everything was gone.

  “ROSE!” he yelled at the top of his voice.

  And his voice echoed through the corridors in vain.

  He was little boy lost. Last man standing. A rooster with nowhere to roost. The king who would give his kingdom for a horse.

  He reached for the phone and pressed the number for Lis on the third floor, Homicide Division.

  Twenty-five seconds passed before anyone answered.

  “Department A, secretary speaking,” the voice said. It was Ms. Sørensen, the most indisputably hostile of all Carl’s colleagues. Ilse the She-Wolf in person.

  “Ms. Sørensen,” he ventured, gentle as a purring cat. “This is Carl Mørck. I’m sitting here all forlorn in the basement. What’s going on? Would you happen to know where Assad and Rose are?”

  Less than a millisecond passed before she hung up. The cow.

  He stood up and headed for Rose’s domain a little farther down the corridor. Maybe the mystery of the missing files would be solved there. It was a perfectly reasonable thought, destroyed when he discovered to his horror that on the corridor wall between Assad’s and Rose’s offices someone had fixed at least ten pieces of chipboard and plastered them with the contents of the missing files.

  A folding ladder of shiny yellow larch indicated where the last of the cases had been put up. It was one they’d had to shelve. Their second unsolved case in a row.

  Carl took a step back to get the full picture of this paper pandemonium. What on earth were all his files doing on the wall? Had Rose and Assad become completely unhinged all of a sudden? Maybe that was why they’d vanished, bloody imbeciles.

  They hadn’t the guts to stick around.

  Upstairs
on the third floor it was the same story. The place was deserted. Even Ms. Sørensen’s chair behind the counter yawned empty. He checked the offices of the homicide chief as well as his deputy. He wandered into the lunchroom, then the briefing room. It was like the place had been evacuated.

  What the fuck was going on? Had there been a bomb scare? Or had the police reform finally got to the point where the staff had been kicked out into the street so all the buildings could be sold off? Had the new, so-called justice minister had a fit? When would the news channel be turning up?

  He scratched the back of his neck, then picked up a phone and called the duty desk.

  “Carl Mørck here. Where the hell is everyone?”

  “Most of them are gathered in the Remembrance Yard.”

  The Remembrance Yard? What the hell for? September the nineteenth was six months away yet.

  “In remembrance of what? As far as I’m aware, the anniversary of the internment of Danish police officers by the German occupying forces isn’t even remotely around the corner. What are they doing?”

  “The commissioner wanted to speak to a couple of departments about adjustments following the reform. Sorry about that, Carl. We thought you knew.”

  “But I just spoke to Ms. Sørensen.”

  “Most likely she’s had all calls sent on to her mobile. I’m sure that’ll be the explanation.”

  Carl shook his head. They were stark raving mad. All of them. By the time he reached the Remembrance Yard, the Justice Ministry would probably have changed everything around again.

  He stared through the door at the chief’s soft, enticing armchair. That was one place, at least, where a man could close his eyes without an audience.

  Ten minutes later, he woke up with the deputy chief’s paw on his shoulder and Assad’s cheerful, round eyes peering point-blank into his face.

  Peace over.

  “Come on, Assad,” he said, extracting himself from the chair. “You and I are going downstairs to pull all those sheets of paper off the wall sharpish, you understand? And where’s Rose?”