Jussi Adler-Olsen: The Keeper of Lost Causes

Then she rummaged in the plastic bag and found the Hopjes sweets at the bottom. Only when the candy lay on her tongue and raised her blood sugar was she ready to turn her attention to the living room.

It wasn’t until then that she shouted: “Hi, Uffe! I’m home now.” Always the same ritual. She knew that Uffe had seen the headlights of her car the second she drove up the hill, but neither of them had a need for contact until the time was right.

She sat down in front of him, trying to catch his eye. “Hey there, mister, are you sitting here watching TV and mooning over that cute newscaster Trine Sick?”

He scrunched up his face so his crow’s feet reached his hairline, but his eyes never left the screen.

“You’re a real rascal, you know that?” Then she took his hand. It was warm and soft, as always. “But you like Lotte Mejlhede better. Do you think I haven’t noticed?”

Now she saw his lips slowly widen into a grin. Contact was established. Oh yes, Uffe was still inside there. And Uffe knew full well what he wanted in life.

She turned to look at the TV screen and listened to the last two reports on the evening news. The first had to do with the Nutrition Council’s appeal to institute a ban on industrially manufactured trans-fatty acids; the second was about the hopeless marketing campaign conducted by the Danish Poultry Association with government financing. She was only too familiar with the issues. They had resulted in two long nights of intense work.

She turned to Uffe and ruffled his hair so that the big scar on his scalp became visible. “Come on, lazybones, let’s see about getting ourselves some dinner.” With her free hand she grabbed one of the sofa cushions and slapped it against the back of his neck until he started shrieking with joy and flailing his arms and legs. Then she let go of his hair, leaped like a mountain goat over the sofa, through the living room and out to the stairwell. It never failed. Hooting and chuckling with glee and stifled energy, Uffe followed close on her heels. Like a couple of train carriages connected by spring steel, they raced upstairs, down again, outside to the front of the garage, back to the living room, and finally out to the kitchen. Soon they would sit down in front of the TV to eat the food that the home help had cooked for them. Yesterday they had watched Mr. Bean . The day before it was Chaplin. Today it would be Mr. Bean again. The video collection that Merete and Uffe owned included only what Uffe enjoyed watching. He usually lasted half an hour before he fell asleep. Then she would spread a blanket over him and let him sleep on the sofa. Later in the night he would find his own way upstairs to the bedroom. There he would take her hand and grunt a bit before falling asleep beside her in the double bed. When he was finally sound asleep, making soft whistling noises, she would turn on the light and start getting ready for the next day.

That was how the evenings and nights unfolded. Because that was how Uffe loved things to be — her sweet, innocent little brother. Sweet, silent Uffe.

It was true that abrass plate on the door was engraved with the words “Department Q,” but the door itself had been lifted off its hinges and was now leaning against a bunch of hot-water pipes that stretched all the way down the long basement corridor. Ten buckets, half filled and giving off paint fumes, still stood inside the room that was supposed to be his office. From the ceiling hung four fluorescent lights, the type that after a while would provoke a splitting headache. But the walls were fine — except for the color. It was hard not to make a comparison with hospitals in Eastern Europe.

“Viva, Marcus Jacobsen,” grumbled Carl, trying to get a grip on the situation.

For the last hundred yards along the basement corridor he hadn’t seen a soul. In his end of the basement there were no people, there was no daylight, air, or anything else that might distinguish the place from the Gulag Archipelago. Nothing was more natural than to compare his domain with the fourth circle of hell.

He looked down at his two spanking-new computers and the bundle of wires attached to them. Apparently the information superhighway had been split up so that the intranet was linked to one computer and the rest of the world to the other. He patted computer number two. Here he could sit for hours and surf the Net to his heart’s content. No pesky rules about secure surfing and safeguarding the central servers; at least that was something. He looked around for an ashtray and tapped a cigarette out of the pack. “Smoking is extremely hazardous to you and those around you,” it said on the label. He glanced around. The few termites that might thrive down here could probably handle it. He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. There was definitely a certain advantage to being head of his own department.

“We’ll send the cases down to you,” Marcus Jacobsen had said, but there wasn’t so much as a single sheet of A5 paper on the desk, and all the shelves were empty. They must have thought he needed time to settle into the place. But Carl didn’t mind; he wasn’t about to work on anything until the spirit happened to move him.

He shoved the chair sideways over to the desk, sat down, and propped his feet up on the corner. That was how he’d sat for most of the time he’d been off on sick leave. During the first few weeks at home he’d simply stared into space, smoking cigarettes and trying not to think about the weight of Hardy’s heavy, paralyzed body or the rattling sound that Anker had made before he died. After that he’d surfed the Internet. Aimlessly, without any sort of plan, just trying to numb his mind. That was exactly what he intended to do now. He looked at his watch. He had just about five hours to kill before he could go home.

Carl lived in Allerød, which had been his wife’s choice. They’d moved there a couple of years before she walked out on him and moved into a cottage in an allotment garden in Islev. She’d looked at a map of Zealand and quickly worked out that if you wanted to have it all, you needed plenty of dough in the bank — or else you could move to Allerød. Nice little town on the S-train line, surrounded by fields, with forested land “within walking distance,” as they say. It had lots of pleasant shops, a cinema, theater, social groups, and, to top it all, the house was located in the Rønneholt Park development. His wife had been ecstatic. For a reasonable price they could buy a semidetached house made from stacked-up breeze blocks with plenty of room for both of them, as well as her son. They would even have access to tennis courts, an indoor swimming pool, and a community center, all in the proximity of fields of grain, a marsh, and a hell of a lot of good neighbors. Because she’d read that in Rønneholt Park everyone cared about each other. Back then that hadn’t been a plus as far as Carl was concerned, because who the hell believed that sort of crap anyway? But later on it had turned out to be important. Without his friends in Rønneholt Park, Carl would have fallen flat on his ass. Both metaphorically and literally. First his wife took off. Then she decided she didn’t want a divorce, but instead took up residence in the allotment garden. Next she went through a whole series of young lovers, and she had the bad habit of ringing Carl to tell him all about them. Then her son refused to keep living with her in the garden cottage, and in the full throes of puberty had moved back in with Carl. And finally there was the shooting out in Amager, which brought to a screeching halt everything that Carl had been clinging to: a solid purpose in life and a couple of good colleagues who didn’t give a damn whether he’d gotten out of bed on the wrong side or not. No, if it hadn’t been for Rønneholt Park and the people who lived there, he would have really been up shit creek.