And there was his car. Less than fifty meters from Lisbeth’s house. How the hell did it take them so long to walk such a short distance?
He fumbled in his pockets for the keys and felt a lump that wasn’t supposed to be there.
His wallet.
Carl frowned. Had he really been in such a state yesterday that he hadn’t checked all his pockets properly when he’d discovered it was gone?
But he had, he knew he had. So how could it possibly be there now? Had Lisbeth played a trick on him? Did she want him to feel indebted? Did she somehow think it would aid the nocturnal cause? That it would help her believe she had him hooked?
He shook his head. If that was it, then she must be crazy.
He opened the wallet, convinced he was going to find a note containing something like: Sorry, darling, your turn to pay next time.
Or just: I’m wild about you. Call me, Here’s my number.
He smiled as he found an unfamiliar piece of paper folded among his receipts. Good coppering, mate, he congratulated himself. Can’t fool me, ha-ha.
But the note wasn’t what he was expecting. Nowhere near.
It was a printout of a satellite photo of Kregme, marked with a cross in the middle.
HERE IS STARK’S BODY, someone had scrawled in irregular block letters. ZOLA KILLED HIM.
And at the bottom was an address. Likewise in Kregme.
–
More than an hour passed before Carl had picked up Assad and they finally got to the patch of woods between the lake and the road on the one side and hedgerows and fields on the other.
“Sure doesn’t smell good here, Carl,” Assad mumbled, looking askance at a muck spreader trundling its way over the landscape. But Carl wasn’t bothered. He was from north Jutland, where the delectable fragrance of shit was the smell of money. Any farmer with great ambitions needed shit, tons of the stuff.
“It’s pretty open here,” he said, scanning the terrain ahead where the road dipped out of sight.
He glanced at the map he’d found in his wallet. “How far do we have to go into these woods, do you reckon?”
Assad rasped his hand across the stubble of his chin. “Seventy-five meters, max. A hundred, maybe.”
How could seventy-five meters, max, be a hundred?
“OK, let’s pull in at that gap in the trees over there.” Carl nodded toward farther up the road to the right, locating the same point on the satellite photo. “Seems like a logical place to go into the woods if you’re dragging a body away from the road. A car could park here with the trunk facing the top of the hill and nobody would be able to see what you were doing unless they were doing thirty kilometers an hour. And no one drives that slowly here, believe me. This is hillbilly country.”
“Hill Billy? Who’s he? Does he own the land here?”
“Yeah, precisely,” Carl replied, shaking his head. Hill Billy? Where did the guy think they were, anyway?
They stepped cautiously through the vegetation, noting snapped branches as well as stones trampled into the earth. There were a surprising number of the latter, as though someone had been here only recently.
“It looks like a whole herd was here,” said Assad, indicating a pile of leaves pressed flat.
Carl nodded and looked up at the ominous black clouds that were gathering overhead. Was it really going to rain now? Brilliant timing, after so many days of scorching sunshine.
“I don’t think we’re far enough in yet, Carl. You can still see the traffic through the trees, so they would risk being seen from the road.”
Carl nodded and peered over the treetops. Maybe they ought to call the dog unit in. This wasn’t going to be easy without them.
He swore under his breath, vowing to put his rubber boots on next time, no matter how stupid they made him look. Right now his own shoes felt like two clods of mud.
“Hey,” Assad called out from farther on. “I think I’m there. But there’s no body as far as I can see.”
Carl frowned as he pushed his way through the underbrush. The earth here was rather looser and drier than it was elsewhere. Here and there the branches of bushes and sapling trees were snapped and broken. Before Assad’s battered old shoes lay a pile of earth heaped on a layer of withered leaves, so someone must have been digging here since the previous autumn.
Carl took the Google printout from his pocket and tried to see if there was anything in the immediate vicinity that he might be able to localize on the map: a tall tree, a clearing, whatever.
“Are we sure this is the right place?”
Assad nodded. “Unless a fox has been playing around with a wig of real human hair, I would say this seems to prove it.”
He pointed down in to the hole. Sure enough. Hair. Red hair.
–
“You keep a low profile now, Assad. If there’s anything you want to say, give me a sign first, OK?”
They went up the garden path to the house that, if the note in Carl’s wallet was anything to go by, was where the person called Zola lived.
Assad nodded. “I will jump up and down and dance the samba before I say a word, Carl. Cross my hearth and hope to die.”
“Heart, Assad. But don’t bother dying just yet, eh?” Carl rang the doorbell, then scanned the neighborhood while they waited. A run-of-the-mill neighborhood of single-family dwellings in an average town, up where northern Zealand stopped being for folks with three cars in the garage.
In front of the house was a yellow van with nothing to distinguish it but its number plates. Carl assumed it meant someone was in, though the place seemed rather dead.
“The DNA test will likely tell us if the hair you found up there matches the specimens from Stark’s home,” Carl said, handing the evidence bag to Assad. “This could turn out to be a major breakthrough, but who the hell is that lad who knows so much about all this?”
“I think we can assume he has been here at some point, don’t you think?” Assad replied, his snout halfway through the mail slot.
“Can you see anything?” Carl managed to ask, just before the door was flung open.
The burly guy glared at Carl and the kneeling Assad with eyes full of trouble and distrust.
“What do you want here?” he said, with the kind of measured coolness usually associated with receptionists in multinational concerns or tax authority staff just before closing time.
Carl produced his ID. “We’d like to speak to Zola,” he said, expecting a cocky smile and a clear statement to the effect that Zola wasn’t in.
“Just a minute, I’ll have a look,” the man answered, and two minutes later they were standing in a living room that would have reduced an interior designer to tears. An unusually gloomy color scheme made the walls look like they were about to fall in on top of them with all their shaggy tapestries, life-sized portraits and an assortment of voodoo-like trinkets. The room was at once pompous and mysterious, a stark contrast to the small, spartan bedrooms with bunk beds they had passed in the hall.
Zola appeared, accompanied by a huge, gangling wolfhound, and sporting a smile noticeably absent from his portraits on the wall.
“To what do I owe the honor?” he inquired in English, gesturing for them to be seated.
Carl briefly explained their business, assessing the man in front of him as he spoke. Powerful, piercing eyes. Long hair. Well-groomed. Clad in a colorful, hippyish jacket and baggy pants. The man looked like the reincarnation of a guru from a forgotten age.
He didn’t react at all to the information that someone had presumably buried a body in a shallow grave close by, and that Zola had been named as a person the police ought to be questioning about it. But as soon as Carl mentioned the boy, and how he’d been close enough to him to lift his wallet, Zola raised his eyebrows and leaned forward.