She turned toward her desk, bent down, and brought up a manila folder of the archived materials.
Carl tried to keep his wandering eyes in check. There was certainly more of her since she had given birth to her last child at the age of forty-six. Her body looked just as it should, but maybe one could help her along by burning off some of that baby belly. He breathed deeply. She had always been his first choice when he tuned in to his nighttime fantasies, and then she went and pulled this number on him.
“No,” she said, her hand on a row of numbers. “I didn’t understand it either, but look, what I wrote is correct. I’m sorry, Carl, but you’ve handed in exactly as many reports on closed and solved cases as I’ve noted here.” She pointed at the number on the last line. Not a number Carl recognized.
“I’ve even embellished it a little, Carl, sweetie.” There was that smile with the overlapping front teeth, whatever good it was just now.
Hearing the sound of steps behind him, Carl turned around. It was the police commissioner in his best suit on his way in to Lars Bj?rn’s office.
The nod he directed at Carl was extremely reserved. The chosen efficiency expert of police headquarters was obviously on one of his rare but fierce rounds.
—
“Where is Rose?” shouted Carl when he reached the final step on his way down to the basement.
The echo from the empty corridor had hardly returned before Assad poked his curly mop of hair around the opening to his broom cupboard of an office.
“She isn’t here, Carl. She left.”
“Left? When?”
“Just after you went to court. At least two hours ago, so I wouldn’t count on her coming back today. At least not imminently.”
“Do you know anything about Rose not sending the reports on the cases we’ve cleared up—apart from the Habersaat case, obviously?”
“What cases? When?”
“Our man up on the Walk of Fame says that over the last twenty-four months, Rose has only delivered a fifth of the reports to homicide.”
Assad looked shocked. Obviously he didn’t know.
“Damn it, Assad, she’s gone loopy.” Carl walked determinedly to his desk, dialed Rose’s home number, and let it ring until her answering machine kicked in.
It wasn’t a message he had heard before. Rose’s answering-machine message was normally borderline hysterically bubbly, but this time the voice sounded unusually hoarse and sad.
“This is Rose Knudsen,” it said. “If you need me for anything, tough luck. Leave a message but don’t count on me listening to it because that’s just the way I am.” And then came the beep.
“Rose, come on, answer the phone; it’s important,” Carl said anyway. Maybe she was on the other end snarling, maybe even laughing, but he’d put a stop to that when he got ahold of her. Because if it was Rose who had made such an outstandingly shoddy job of her reports, Department Q would be one employee down regardless.
“What about you, Gordon? Did you find any of Rose’s documentation?”
He nodded, leaning in over Carl’s computer. “I’ve sent it to you so you can see for yourself.” He opened the file, scrolling down through the pages.
Carl was tight-lipped. Line for line, there was an exact account of which cases Department Q had been working on, which case numbers, the nature of the cases, and the dates when they were opened and closed and with what result. Green columns for cases solved, blue for those they were working on right now, purple for those they had put to one side, and red for those they had given up on. There was even a date for when the report was finished and forwarded to management. It was fair to say that viewers of the file would be met with a very positive impression, and all cases apart from the Habersaat case were checked with a tick. All according to the book.
“I don’t know what this is all about, Carl, but our Rose has done what she was meant to,” said Gordon, coming to her defense like a knight in shining armor.
“How has she delivered them?” came a voice from the door.
Gordon turned toward Assad, who was standing with a cup of sugar-filled tea in his hand.
“As an attachment sent on our intranet.”
Assad nodded. “To what address? Have you checked, Gordon?”
He stretched out his lanky body, plodding back to Rose’s office while mumbling to himself. He obviously hadn’t.
Carl pricked his ears. Hard leather soles on the concrete floor wasn’t a sound you normally heard down here. An ominous sound like that adopted by Hollywood actors when creating the illusion of a Nazi officer in second-rate war films could be replicated only by Mrs. S?rensen. Normal police workers wear rubber soles, unless they have a permanent seat in the domain of the police commissioner, and it definitely wasn’t any of them.
“Goodness, it stinks here,” was Mrs. S?rensen’s first remark, her top lip drowning in small beads of sweat. The other day, it had been remarked that during her hot flashes, she sat with her feet in a tub of cold water under the desk. There was always a good story about Mrs. S?rensen’s behavior, and it was seldom untrue.
“You’d better not drag this Middle Eastern smell with you upstairs to us,” she continued, placing a plastic folder in front of him. “Here are the detailed statistics for your department. Over the last six months, we’ve as good as not received a single report from you, leading management to conclude that you haven’t solved anything of significance in that time frame. But now Lis and I have begun to question that because we do follow what goes on here at headquarters, and thank goodness we do. We know that Department Q has had good publicity in the media concerning the cases you’ve worked on in that same time period, so something doesn’t add up, I’ll say that much.”
She attempted a little smile but was obviously not in the habit because it didn’t work.
“Look at this, Carl,” said Gordon, bursting in. He put the printout on the table and pointed. “Rose has sent her files to both Lis and Catarina.” He nodded to her. “Only to Lis in the beginning, and since Lis’s maternity leave almost exclusively to Catarina S?rensen.”
Mrs. S?rensen bent her sweaty body over the printout. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “The address is right enough and, in principle, it is to me. The problem is that it is more than twenty months since that address has been active; I got divorced in the meantime and went back to my maiden name. The initials aren’t CS anymore but CUS.”
Carl put his head in his hands. Why wasn’t there an automatic redirection from the old e-mail address to the new one? Was it sabotage, or had the mess the rest of society lived in now come to them?
“What does CUS stand for?” asked Gordon.
“Catarina Underberg S?rensen,” she answered with pathos.
“Why still S?rensen, when you’ve changed back to your maiden name?”
“Because, little Gordon, Underberg S?rensen was my maiden name.”