Virklund suppressed a chuckle. “I’ll put it this way: if she used a toaster it was the toaster that got burned, not the bread. But-”
He stopped in mid-sentence.
They all looked at one another.
–
“I need to say to you, Assad, that I can’t condone your beating people up in my office,” Carl said, after the man had gone. “I hope you realize that one more incident like that and you’ll be out on your ass. Explain yourself.”
“Come on now, Carl, you saw how it lightened up the mood. You know, when a camel farts there can be two reasons.”
Oh God, not those effing camels again.
“Either they have eaten too much grass or else it’s just to hear some music beneath the desert sun.”
“For Pete’s sake, Assad. Is that supposed to justify your punching the man?”
“I am only trying to say that being out on an oil rig so much of the time must be a little dull.”
“I’m sure it is. So you were demonstrating that brawls are just a form of entertainment for the man, is that it?”
“Yes, he fights for the fun of it, Carl. You saw what happened. He knew he was insulting us and I showed him how one deals with it and that afterward there need be no hard feelings. I punched him and we were even. He understood this.”
“So like the camel he lets go of his inhibitions for the sake of bringing a bit of music into his life, and that’s why he’s always getting into fights. But why shouldn’t he let loose on his wife for the same reason?”
“Because beating up your wife is not half as much fun as beating up your friends, that’s why.”
“I’d say that was a very wobbly basis on which to write him off as a killer, Assad.”
“I am not writing him off. But, Carl, he who prods the camel’s ass may find himself with a hoof in the balls. This is how it is.”
Christ!
“So this time the camel’s female, or what? And your point is that there’s no fun in punching someone if the other party doesn’t think it’s fun as well. Is that it?”
Assad smiled. “You understand it then. Well done, Carl.”
–
Back when Carl was a young officer, reports could be written in twenty minutes with two fingers on a typewriter. Nowadays it required ten fingers and fifteenth-generation word-processing software and took two and a half hours if you were lucky. Reports were no longer conclusions but more like conclusions of the conclusions’ conclusions.
Under normal circumstances, Carl detested the bureaucracy of it, but today it suited him fine to hole up in front of the computer, even though he had difficulty focusing his thoughts.
He heard Rose’s and Gordon’s voices in the corridor.
As far as he could make out, she was bragging about how close she was to solving the Anweiler case for Department Q, and it was impossible to overlook Gordon’s consuming adoration. If there was anything down in the archive he needed to check, his strategy appeared to involve getting into Rose’s panties first.
Carl tried to ignore them. Who wanted to listen to that, the way he was feeling?
“All right, Gordon,” he called out as they passed his door. “Got the buggy into the shed yet?”
Rose gave him an icy glare and slammed the door in his face.
Carl frowned. Had that lanky bugger, who’d hardly been weaned off his baby food, actually succeeded in turning Rose’s head?
He turned back to his flickering screen and began his summary of the Rotterdam debacle. It was no easy job. If truth were told, the investigators who had gone through the nail-gun killings in Schiedam had a surprisingly poor command of the English language compared to other Dutch people he’d met.
Two pages was all it came to. Probably not enough. Again, he was having difficulty concentrating. Maybe it would help once he received the supplementary material from the meeting in Rotterdam. There had to be someone at HQ who could translate that bristly language.
He shook his head.
Help? Like hell it would.
The only way he was going to get any peace of mind was to raise the curtain on the second act of his Mona drama. And it had better be more constructive than the first.
He dialed her work number. Predictably, someone else answered. In a fit of innovation Mona had moved her practice a couple of months earlier into a shared clinic, the only snag being that callers always had to go through the secretary, a young woman who apparently considered herself as competent a psychologist as those who conducted their therapy in the rooms behind her desk.
“I’m afraid Mona Ibsen isn’t available at the moment, she’s with a client. Well, maybe he’s not a client, but the fact is, the sign on her door says she’s in a session.”
He’d give her some facts next time he stood leaning against her counter.
The fact is! He had hardly put down the phone before the ugly and inappropriate feeling came over him that Mona might have had a hidden agenda in giving him his marching orders.
Could she have been running around with other men while he’d been trawling the streets in search of a wedding ring? Had he missed the signals?
No, Mona wasn’t like that. If she’d met someone else she would have told him.
Nevertheless, a nasty sense of betrayal crept over him. It was a feeling he hadn’t known since he was twelve. Not since that blistering summer day when he had caught sight of his one and only childhood flame, Lise, posing at the water’s edge at the outdoor swimming baths. All of a sudden, there she was in a low-cut bathing suit with taut, suntanned thighs, and light-years away from him. They had grown up together, been blushing almost-sweethearts, and suddenly her beckoning smile was turned in the direction of others. And when finally she noticed him, her smile changed. In one second she had become a woman and he had been left behind, humiliated, still imprisoned within the body of a boy.
It had taken him at least ten years to rid himself of that feeling of desolation in which she had left him, and now here he was again, sidelined, left on his own. It wasn’t jealousy but something deeper, more painful.
“For Christ’s sake, man,” he said to himself. “You can’t do without her. And when did that happen?”
13
They heard the stamp of Rose’s approaching footsteps and braced themselves. Time to face the music for yesterday’s blunder. How could he have said that about her father? He knew it was a touchy subject.
“Take it easy, Carl. I had a nice chat with Allah this morning. This will be a fine day,” Assad assured him.
Amazing, how well connected the man was.
“Right, come on, you two,” were Rose’s first words. Her eyes were sparkling and she seemed her old self. “I’ve got a little surprise for you.”
It was clear she was expecting protest, so she turned on her heel and marched off again in a manner that defied disobedience.
Apart from her nose peeling after her tour of Brumleby, the lass was on the top of her form. Assad still had his injuries to contend with, and Carl’s lack of sleep and tar-clogged lungs served likewise to slow their tempo. Both were already gasping for breath as they reeled past the duty desk out into HQ’s courtyard in time to see Rose striding over Hambrosgade toward the parking spaces across the street.
No tour van could have been better suited to the name scrawled across its sides in barbed-wire lettering. The sight of this spray-painted wreck must have been a joy for death metal fans, with its fiery red flames licking from bumper to bumper.
Daggers & Swords from Malmö had definitely gone all out.
Rose pulled the sliding door open with a clonk and indicated for them to get in.
Hard to believe, but there sat Sverre Anweiler, his pasty face nodding darkly in their direction. He gestured toward the bench opposite his own and produced three cans of beer that he shoved over to them without a word.