A Conspiracy of Faith Read online

  Assad shook his head. “We cannot, Carl.”

  Carl stood up and tucked his shirt into his trousers. What the hell was the man on about? Of course they could. Wasn’t he supposed to be the boss around here?

  “Just come on, will you? And get hold of Rose. NOW!”

  “The basement’s closed off,” homicide deputy Lars Bjørn butted in. “Asbestos sifting down from the pipe lagging. Health and Safety have been around and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Assad nodded. “I’m afraid this is true, Carl. We had to bring all our stuff up here. There is not much room, but we did find a nice chair for you,” he added, as though it could ever be a comfort. “We are only us two at the moment. Rose did not fancy it, so she is off on a long weekend. She’ll be back later on today, though.”

  They might just as well have kicked him in the gonads.

  2

  She had sat staring into the candles until they burned out and darkness wrapped itself around her. It wasn’t the first time he’d left her on her own, but he’d never done it on their anniversary before.

  She inhaled deeply and got to her feet. Lately, she’d given up standing by the window to wait for him, had stopped writing his name with her finger on the pane as it steamed up from her breath.

  It wasn’t as if there had been no warning signs the time they first met. Her best friend had had her doubts, and her mother had told her straight out. He was too old for her. There was something shifty about him. A man you couldn’t trust. A man you couldn’t fathom.

  So now she hadn’t seen her friend or her mother for a very long time. And for that reason her desperation increased while her need for human contact was greater than ever. Who could she talk to? There was no one there.

  She gazed into the empty, orderly rooms and pressed her lips together as the tears welled up in her eyes.

  Then she heard the child stir and pulled herself together. Wiped the tip of her nose with her index finger and took two deep breaths.

  If her husband was being unfaithful, then he would do well not to count on her.

  There had to be more to life than this.

  He came into the bedroom so silently only his shadow on the wall gave him away. Broad shoulders, arms wide open. He lay down and drew her in to him without a word. Warm and naked.

  She had expected sweetness, but also well-considered apologies. Maybe she’d been afraid of the slight scent of some strange woman and guilt-ridden hesitation in all the wrong places, but instead he grabbed hold of her, turned her roughly onto her back, and began greedily to tear off her nightclothes. The moonlight was in his face. It turned her on. Now the waiting, the frustration, the worry, and the doubt were all gone.

  It was six months since he’d last been like this.

  Thank God, at last.

  “I have to go away for a while, sweetheart,” he said without warning over the breakfast table, stroking the child on the cheek. Distracted, as though his words didn’t mean anything.

  She frowned and pursed her lips to keep the inevitable question inside for a moment. Then she put her fork down on the plate and sat with her gaze fixed on the scrambled eggs and bacon. The night had been long. It was still with her, an ache around her pelvis, but also the kisses and cuddles when they had lain there spent, gazing warmly into each other’s eyes. Until now, it had allowed her to forget all thought of time and place. Until now. For at this moment, the pale March sun forced its way into the room like an unwelcome guest to illuminate the facts. Her husband was going away. Again.

  “Why can’t you tell me what you do? I’m your wife. I won’t tell anyone,” she said.

  He sat with his cutlery half-raised. His eyes grew dark then.

  “Seriously,” she went on. “How long am I supposed to wait this time for you to be like you were last night again? Are we back to where we were before? Me not knowing what you’re up to, and you hardly being present, even when you’re here?”

  He looked at her with piercing eyes. “Haven’t you known from the start that I can’t talk about my work?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Well, then. Let’s leave it at that.”

  His knife and fork clattered against the plate, and he turned toward their son with something supposed to resemble a smile.

  Her breathing was steady and calm, but despair surged inside her. It was true enough. Long before their wedding, he had explained to her that he was unable to speak about what he did. He might have hinted it was something to do with intelligence, she couldn’t really remember anymore. But as far as she knew, people in the intelligence services still lived reasonably normal lives alongside their jobs. Their own life together was in no way normal. Unless intelligence work also involved being unfaithful, because as far as she could see, that was the only possible explanation for his behavior.

  She gathered the plates and thought about giving him an ultimatum there and then. Risking the anger she feared but had yet to experience to its full extent.

  “When will I see you again?” she asked.

  He looked at her and smiled. “I’ll be home next Wednesday, I imagine. This type of job usually takes a week, ten days at most.”

  “You’ll be home just in time for your bowling tournament then,” she said sarcastically.

  He stood up and put his arms around her, drawing her in toward the bulk of his body, clasping his hands under her chest. The feeling of his head on her shoulder had always sent a tingle down her spine. But now she pulled away.

  “True,” he said. “I should be back in good time for that. So before you know it, it’ll be last night all over again. OK?”

  After he had gone and the sound of the car engine had died away, she stood for a long time with her arms folded and her gaze out of focus. It was one thing to be lonely in life. But it was quite another not to know what you were paying that price for. The chances of ever catching a man like hers cheating on her were minimal, she knew that, even though she had never tried. His territory was a vast expanse, and he was a careful man; everything in their life indicated that. Pensions, insurance, double-checking of windows and doors, suitcases and luggage, desk always tidy, no hastily jotted notes or receipts left behind in pockets or drawers. He was a man who left no trace. Not even the scent of him remained more than a few minutes after he had left the room. How would she ever uncover an affair unless she put a private investigator on him? And where was she supposed to get the means to do that?

  She thrust out her lower lip and expelled warm breath slowly into her face. Like she always did prior to an important decision. On the riding ground before clearing the highest obstacle. Before choosing her confirmation dress. Even before saying her vows in the church. And before going outside to see if life might be any different there in that gentle light.

  3

  David Bell, a convivial hulk of a police sergeant, liked to take things easy, to sit and stare out at the waves as they smashed against the rocks. All the way up at John O’Groats, Scotland’s very extremity, where the sun shone only half as long but twice as stunningly. This was David’s birthplace, and it was where he intended to die when his time was up.

  David Bell was made for the rugged sea. Why should he idle away his time sixteen miles farther south in the office of Bankhead Road Police Station in Wick, when this slumbering harbor meant so much to him? It was a fact he made no bones about.

  It was also the reason why his boss always dispatched him to sort things out whenever there was trouble brewing in the communities up north. David would trundle up in his patrol car and threaten the local hotheads that he’d call in an officer from Inverness. It was generally enough to settle things down again. In these parts, no one wanted strangers from the city nosing about in their back gardens any more than they wanted horse piss in their Skull Splitter ale. It was more than enough having folk come through for the Orkney ferry.

  Once things quieted down, only the waves remained, and if there was one thing Sergeant Bell had plenty of time
for it was the waves.

  Had it not been for Bell’s characteristic sedateness, the man who found the bottle might have hurled it back whence it came. But since the sergeant happened to be sitting there in his neatly pressed uniform with the wind in his hair and his cap on the rock beside him, handing it to him seemed the obvious thing to do.

  The bottle had been caught in a trawl and had glinted slightly, though time and the sea had dulled its sheen, and the youngest man on board the Brew Dog had seen right away there was something special about it.

  “Chuck it over the side, Seamus,” the skipper had shouted when he discovered the message inside. “Those things are bad luck. Wreckage in a bottle, we call them. The Devil’s in the ink and waiting to be let loose. Don’t you know the stories?” But young Seamus didn’t, and he decided to take it ashore.

  When Bell finally got back to the station in Wick, one of the local drunks had trashed two of the offices and the duty staff were rather weary of trying to keep the idiot pinned to the floor. That was how David Bell came to remove his jacket, whereupon Seamus’s bottle fell out of its pocket. And it was how he came to pick the bottle up and put it down again on the windowsill so he could concentrate his attention on planting his full weight on the chest of this drunken oaf in order to squeeze some of the air out of him. But anyone treating a full-blooded Viking descendant in such a fashion is liable to get more than he bargained for. And so it was that the drunk delivered such a blow to David Bell’s testicles that any recollection of the bottle was engulfed by the blaring sirens and flashing blue lights his nervous system frantically emitted as a consequence.

  And so the bottle remained undisturbed in the sunny corner of the windowsill for a very long time indeed. No one paid it any heed, and no one worried that the paper it contained might be damaged by the sunlight and the condensation that with time appeared on the inside of the glass.

  No one bothered to try to read the collection of semi-obliterated letters that appeared uppermost, and for that same reason no one gave a thought to what the word “HJÆLP” might mean.

  The bottle did not come into human hands again until a young man who felt himself unreasonably treated on account of a measly parking fine swamped the intranet of Wick Police Station with a veritable tidal wave of viruses. In such a situation, the routine was to get in touch with a computer expert called Miranda McCulloch. When pedophiles encrypted their filth, when hackers covered up all traces of their online banking transactions, and when asset-strippers wiped their hard disks, it was Miranda McCulloch they kneeled before.

  She was given an office. The staff were moved to tears and treated her like royalty, filling up her thermos with scalding coffee, throwing open the windows, and making sure the radio was tuned in to Radio Scotland. Miranda McCulloch was indeed a woman appreciated wherever she went.

  Because of the open windows and the billowing curtains, she noticed the bottle on her first day.

  What a fine little bottle, she thought to herself, and wondered at the shadow inside it as she dredged through cipher columns of malicious code. When on the third day she got to her feet feeling well satisfied, her job complete, and with a reasonable idea of what kind of virus might be anticipated next time around, she stepped across to the windowsill and picked the bottle up. It was a lot heavier than she had thought. And warm to the touch.

  “What’s that inside it?” she asked the secretary next door. “Is it a letter?”

  “I’ve no idea,” came the answer. “David Bell came in with it a long time ago. I think maybe it was just for fun.”

  Miranda held the bottle against the light. Was that writing on the paper? It was hard to tell because of the condensation on the inside.

  She turned it in her hands. “Where is this David Bell? Is he on duty?”

  The secretary shook her head. “No, I’m afraid he’s not. David was killed not far out of town a couple of years back. They’d given chase to a hit-and-run driver and it all went wrong. It was a terrible thing. David was such a nice chap.”

  Miranda nodded. She wasn’t really listening. She was certain now that there was writing on the paper, but that wasn’t what had caught her attention. It was what was at the bottom of the bottle.

  On close inspection through the sand-blown glass, the coagulated mass looked remarkably like blood.

  “Do you think I could take this bottle with me? Is there anyone here I should ask?”

  “Try Emerson. He drove with David for a couple of years. I’m sure it’ll be all right.” The secretary turned toward the corridor. “Hey, Emerson,” she yelled, rattling the panes in their frames. “Come here a minute, will you?”

  Miranda said hello. Emerson was a pleasant, stocky man with sad eyes.

  “You want to take it with you? Be my guest. I’m certainly not wanting it myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s probably just nonsense. But just before David died, he remembered the bottle and said he’d better get it opened and do something about it. Some lad off a fishing boat handed it in to him in John O’Groats, and then the boat went down with the lad and everyone else on it a couple of years after. David felt he owed it to the lad to see what was inside. But he died before he got around to it. Not exactly a good omen, is it?”

  Emerson shook his head.

  “Take it away, by all means. There’s no good about that bottle.”

  That same evening, Miranda sat down in her terraced house in the Edinburgh suburb of Granton and stared at the bottle. It was some fifteen centimeters tall, blue-white in color, slightly flattened, and relatively long-necked. It could have been a scent bottle, though rather on the large side. More likely it had contained eau de cologne and was probably a good age, too. She tapped a knuckle against it. The glass was solid, that much was apparent.

  She smiled. “And what secrets might you conceal, dear?” she mused, taking a sip of red wine from her glass before using the corkscrew to scrape out whatever it was that sealed the neck. The lump smelled of tar, but the bottle’s time in the sea had made the exact nature of the material hard to determine.

  She tried to fish out the paper inside, but it was clearly in a state of decomposition and damp to the touch. Turning the bottle in her hand, she tapped her fingers against the bottom, but the paper budged not a millimeter. This prompted her to take the bottle into the kitchen and strike it a couple of times with a meat tenderizer.

  That helped. The bottle splintered into blue crystals that spilled out over the work surface like crushed ice.

  She stared at the piece of paper that lay on the chopping board and frowned. Her gaze passed over the shattered glass and she took a deep breath.

  Maybe it hadn’t been the best of ideas after all.

  “Yes,” her colleague Douglas in Forensics confirmed. “It’s blood all right. No doubt about it. Well done. The way the blood and the condensation have been absorbed into the paper is quite characteristic. Especially here, where the signature’s completely obliterated. The color of it, and the pattern of absorption. Aye, it’s all typical.”

  He unfolded the paper using tweezers and bathed it in blue light. Traces of blood all over, diffusely iridescent in every letter.

  “It’s written in blood?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “And you agree with me that the heading is an appeal for help? It sounds like it, at least.”

  “Aye, I reckon so,” Douglas replied. “But I doubt we’ll be able to salvage much more than the heading. It’s quite damaged, that letter. Besides, it might be very old. The thing to do now is to make sure it’s properly treated and conserved, and then maybe we’ll have a stab at dating it. And of course we’ll need to have a linguistics expert take a look at it. Hopefully, they’ll be able to tell us what language that is.”

  Miranda nodded. She had her own idea about that.

  Icelandic.

  4

  “Health and Safety are here, Carl.” Rose was standing in the doorway, looking like she
wasn’t going to budge. Maybe she was hoping to see a fight.

  A small man in a well-pressed suit introduced himself as John Studsgaard. Small, and with an air of authority. Apart from the flat brown briefcase under his arm he seemed harmless enough. A pleasant smile and his hand outstretched. However, it was an impression that evaporated the moment he opened his mouth.

  “There’s a report of asbestos having been found in the corridor here and in the crawl space on the last inspection. We’ll need to inspect the insulation so the area can be made safe for use.”

  Carl peered up at the ceiling. One bloody pipe. The only one in the entire basement. Bollocks.

  “I see you’ve got offices here,” the suit went on. “Would that be in accordance with official occupation and fire regulations for the building?” He was just about to unzip his briefcase, obviously in possession of a stack of documents that would provide him with the answer to his question.

  “Offices? What offices?” said Carl. “You mean the archive briefing space here?”

  “Archive briefing space?” The man looked lost for a second, but then the bureaucrat took charge. “I’m not entirely familiar with the term, but it seems clear to me that a lot of what I would call regular work-related activity is conducted here during the course of a day.”

  “You mean the coffeemaker? We can put it somewhere else if you want.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s more the whole setup. Desks, bulletin boards, shelving, coat hooks, archives, office supplies, photocopiers.”

  “Oh, right, I’m with you now! Listen, do you know how many stairs there are up to the third floor from here?”

  “No.”

  “OK, then you probably don’t know either that we’re short-staffed and that it’d take up most of the day if we had to shoot up and down those stairs every time we needed to photocopy something for the archive. Perhaps you’d prefer to have killers running around on the loose than for us to be able to do our jobs properly?”