Jussi Adler-Olsen - Mercy aka The keeper of lost causes

“Oh yes, this is Daniel Hale, our best collaborative partner on the laboratory front. His name may sound English, but Daniel is Danish, through and through,” the spokesman said afterward, as Merete greeted each delegate in turn.

She shook Hale’s hand, noticing at once the blazing heat of his touch.

“Daniel Hale, is that right?” she asked.

He smiled. For a moment her gaze wavered. How embarrassing.

She glanced over at her secretary, a neutral entity in the office. If Marianne had been there, she would have hidden a gleeful smile behind the papers she was always holding. There was not a hint of a smile from the new secretary.

“You work in a laboratory?” Merete asked.

At that point the spokesman broke in. He needed to make use of the few precious seconds allocated to him. The next delegation was already waiting outside Merete Lynggaard’s office, and no one ever knew when there’d be another chance. It was a matter of money and a costly investment of time.

“Daniel owns the finest little laboratory in all of Scandinavia. Well, it’s not really little anymore, since you acquired the new buildings,” he said, turning to speak to his colleague, who shook his head with a smile. It was a delicious smile. “We’d like to be allowed to submit this report,” the spokesman continued, turning back to Merete. “Perhaps as chair of the Health Committee you’d be willing to study it in depth when time permits. It’s tremendously important for posterity that the issue be given the most serious consideration at once.”

She hadn’t expected to see Daniel Hale down in the Snapstinget restaurant. She was even more surprised to see that he seemed to be waiting for her. On every other day of the week she ate lunch in her office, but each Friday over the past few years, she would join the chairpersons from the health committees of the Socialist and Radical Center parties. All three of them were feisty women who could make the members of the Denmark Party see red. The mere fact that they so openly cultivated their coffee klatch didn’t sit well with a lot of people.

He was alone, half hidden behind a pillar, perched on the very edge of his Kasper Salto chair, with a cup of coffee in front of him. Their eyes met for a second as she came through the glass doors, and it was all Merete could think about the whole time she was there.

When the women got up after finishing their conversation, he came over to her.

She saw people looking at her and murmuring to each other, but she felt mesmerized by his gaze.

Carl was more or lesssatisfied. The workmen had been busy all morning in the basement room, while he’d stood outside in the corridor, making coffee on one of the rolling tables and tapping one cigarette after another out of the pack. Now carpeting covered the floor of his so-called office in Department Q, and the paint cans and everything else had been tossed into gigantic plastic rubbish sacks. The door was back on its hinges, a flat-screen TV had been brought in, a whiteboard and a bulletin board had been hung up, and the bookshelves were filled with his old law books, which other people had thought they could commandeer. In his trouser pocket was the key to a dark blue Peugeot 607, recently decommissioned by the Intelligence Service because they didn’t want their bodyguards riding behind the queen’s royal vehicles in a car with scratches in the paint. The Peugeot had only forty-five thousand kilometers on it, and was now the sole property of Department Q. What a status symbol it was going to be in the parking lot on Magnolievangen. And no more than twenty yards from his bedroom window.

In a couple of days he’d have the assistant they’d promised him. Carl had gotten the workmen to clear out a small room directly across the corridor. The room had been used for storing the battered helmets and shields used by Civil Defense Forces during the riots that erupted over the closing down of the Youth House. Now the space held a desk and chair, a broom cupboard, and all the fluorescent tubes that Carl had thrown out of his own office. Marcus Jacobsen had taken Carl’s request literally and hired a man to do the cleaning and any other necessary tasks, but Marcus required that his assistant clean the rest of the basement as well. This was something Carl was going to get changed at some later date, which Jacobsen was no doubt expecting. It was all part of a tug of war to decide who was going to handle what-and, more specifically, when it would all get done. No matter how one looked at it, it was Carl who was sitting in the dark depths of the basement while the others were upstairs with a view of Tivoli. There needed to be a series of trade-offs, in order to strike a balance.

At one o’clock in the afternoon that day, two secretaries from Admin finally arrived with the case files. They told Carl they contained only the general documents, and if he wanted more extensive background materials, he’d have to send in a requisition form. At least now he had two people from his old department that he could consult. Or at least one of the secretaries: Lis, a warm, fair-haired woman with provocative, slightly overlapping front teeth. With her he would have liked to exchange much more than ideas.

He asked the secretaries to set their stacks of folders on either end of the desk. “Do I happen to see a twinkle in your eye, or do you always look so fantastic, Lis?” he asked the blonde.

The brunette gave her colleague a look that could have made even Einstein feel like a fool. It had probably been a long time since she herself had been the recipient of such a remark.

“Carl, dear,” said the fair-haired Lis, as she always did. “The twinkle in my eye is reserved for my husband and children. When are you going to accept that?”

“I’ll accept it the day the light vanishes and eternal darkness swallows me up along with the rest of the earth,” he replied, not exactly understating his case.

Even before the two secretaries had turned down the corridor and headed for the stairs, the brunette was voicing her indignation.

For the first couple of hours Carl didn’t even glance at the case files. But he did muster the energy to count the folders; that was a form of work, after all. There were at least forty, but he didn’t open any of them. Plenty of time for that. At least another twenty years before retirement, he figured, as he played a couple more games of Spider Solitaire. If he won the next game, he’d consider taking a look at the pile of folders on his right.

After he made his way through at least two dozen games, his cell phone rang. He looked at the display but didn’t recognize the number: 3545-and-something. It was a Copenhagen number.

“Yeah,” he said, expecting to hear Vigga’s overwrought voice. She was always able to find some sympathetic soul to lend her a cell phone. “Get your own phone, Mum!” Jesper was always saying. “It’s fucking annoying that I have to call your neighbors to get hold of you.”

“Yes, hello,” said the voice, and it sounded nothing like Vigga. “This is Birte Martinsen. I’m a psychologist at the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries. I’m just ringing to inform you that when one of the assistant nurses gave Hardy Henningsen some water this morning, he tried to suck it down into his lungs. He’s OK, but very depressed, and he’s been asking for you. Could you possibly come and visit? I think it would help him.”

Carl was allowed to be alone in the room with Hardy, even though the psychologist clearly would have liked to listen in on their conversation.

“So, did you just get sick and tired of it all, old boy?” he said, taking Hardy’s hand. There was a tremor of life in it. Carl had noticed that before. Right now the tips of his middle and index fingers curled slightly, as if they wanted to beckon Carl closer.