“Yes, thanks,” she said dryly. “But I probably shouldn’t have eaten the prawns in the canteen. Prawns have never agreed with me.”
He could feel that his smile had frozen as she walked over to her office.
“Her daughter is very ill, Carl,” said Lis. “She’s got a lot on her plate.”
39
Monday, May 30th, 2016
Olaf Borg-Pedersen’s TV crew had already lined up and turned on a couple of cameras in the middle of the corridor, capturing Carl’s tired descent to the basement. There was even one in his office, and behind Carl’s desk sat the TV producer himself with his sound technician and photographer, waiting like vultures for someone to draw his last breath.
“And Inspector Carl M?rck is a busy man,” he mouthed off as soon as Carl walked in. “Station 3 has been granted access for a few days to follow what goes on behind the scenes as the police work to make society a better place.”
He nodded to his cameraman, who hurried over to the camera and dismounted it from the tripod.
“We are faced with terrible actions every day that ruin the lives of innocent people.”
They’re not all innocent, thought Carl while trying to avoid the handheld camera capturing more images of his already annoyed expression.
“A hit-and-run driver is on the loose, and young women continue to fall victim to the killer. Station 3 would like to contribute to putting a stop to this. Perhaps Carl M?rck has hit a dead end that our viewers can help him out of.”
You’re the one at a dead end, idiot. It’s not even our case, so how about doing your job properly, he thought while nodding and conceiving a new and viable idea to irritate the chief of homicide and the police commissioner even more.
“Yes,” he said seriously. “The public is often our best ally. Where would we be without alert members of the public keeping an eye on unusual situations and events?”
He turned to face the camera.
“But as long as our internal system prevents me from working on cases that have been assigned to others, I can’t help you with this particular case.”
“Are you saying that this case is the jurisdiction of another department?”
“Yes, and here in Department Q we’re not supposed to get involved in ongoing cases, even though it might shed new light on them.”
“Would you call that shortsighted? Shouldn’t the police think outside the box?”
Carl nodded. As the police commissioner had requested, the program finally had something to pursue. Olaf Borg-Pedersen was almost drooling.
“So are we to understand that your hands are tied in relation to the most recent hit-and-run incident?”
The most recent hit-and-run incident? Carl had no idea what he was talking about.
“Just a minute,” he interrupted. “Let me get my assistant. You want the recordings to be realistic, right? He would normally be here when we discuss the latest developments.”
He found Gordon and Assad talking in the situation room, apparently unaware of the chaos Carl had been thrown into.
“How did it go with the police commissioner?” asked Assad.
Carl nodded. “Fine, thanks. But what the hell is going on? Has there been another hit-and-run murder?”
“We don’t know yet,” answered Gordon. “It doesn’t resemble the other murders. More like a nasty accident.”
“Fill me in quickly. The vultures in there want to—”
“And here we are in the Department Q situation room,” came a sudden voice from the doorway, making Carl jump. He turned around toward Olaf Borg-Pedersen, who had a microphone stuck halfway in his mouth and was being closely followed by his colleague with the handheld camera. “As far as we understand, this is the room where the cases are linked together and scrutinized, and where the team tries to gain an overview of all the events,” he continued. “On the notice board on the wall here, we can see the cases the team is working on at the moment. Can you explain what we’re looking at, Carl M?rck?”
“Sorry,” he said, doing his best to hide the information on the notice board from the camera. He damn well didn’t want the Zimmermann case to be spotted by anyone on the second floor. That would be rubbing their noses in it too much. “To enable us to best solve these cases, we can’t go into too much detail regarding our methods in this program.”
“That’s understandable.” Olaf Borg-Pedersen nodded but looked like a man who was determined to get the shots he wanted anyway. “We spoke earlier about the hit-and-run murders. Only four days ago the young Michelle Hansen was massacred in Stenl?se, and the incident was witnessed by two innocent children. Before that, Senta Berger was killed under similar circumstances, and yesterday the victim was Bertha Lind on Amager. What do you have to say about that? Can Department Q already at this stage link this latest terrible incident to the others?” he asked.
“Well,” interrupted Gordon, “in contrast to the other cases, we still don’t know if Bertha Lind was hit intentionally. And in order to link cases like these, there have to be either skid marks with clear tire markings or skid marks indicating the same type of rubber as in the previous cases.”
Carl looked disapprovingly at the lanky sod. This wasn’t meant to get too serious.
“Yes. The way we see it, skid marks or no skid marks,” he interrupted, “there definitely seems to be a serial killer on the loose, and it’s probably time for the press to be given more than the spare information we have provided so far. However, that’s up to the head of communications Janus Staal, so you’ll have to go back up to the second floor.”
Olaf Borg-Pedersen stood up on his toes. “I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve put up the case being referred to as ‘The Nightclub Case’ next to this one. Are we actually dealing with a cluster of interconnected cases?”
Carl suppressed a sigh. What an idiot! Why else would the cases be next to each other? “That’s something we can’t rule out. The young woman, Birna Sigurdardottir, who has now tragically passed away, was on social benefits like the others and around the same age. Did they know each other? Were they involved in something together? That’s the question. But maybe Station 3 viewers can help us with that. And good luck with the interviews with the communications department. Perhaps you’ll have the opportunity to touch on the police policy that sometimes hinders us in working together across departments and cases.”
—
When the TV crew had left, Carl grabbed a well-deserved cup of coffee in his office while laughing out loud with relief. What a load of rubbish he had spouted off. It was hardly what Bj?rn and the commissioner had imagined. Some people might even call it an ambush, but the fact of the matter was that it finally enabled him to get rid of those idiots.