A Conspiracy of Faith by Jussi Adler-Olsen Read Free Book Online

hers.
    He called again. No answer.
    He leaned forward and stared down at the keyboard, feeling his cheeks flush.
    She had better have a good explanation. Revealing unknown aspects of her personality now might force him to demonstrate some new aspects of his own.
    And she wouldn’t like that. She wouldn’t like that at all.

6
    “Well, I must say that Assad’s observation has given us food for thought, Carl,” said the chief, wriggling his shoulders into his leather jacket. In ten minutes he would be standing on a street corner in the Nordvest district, studying bloodstains from the night’s shooting. Carl did not envy him.
    He nodded. “You agree with Assad, then? That there might be a connection between the fires?”
    “That same groove in the victims’ finger bones in three out of four incidents. It certainly gives us something to think about. We’ll just have to wait and see. The material’s with the pathologists, so it’s their shout now. But the nose, Carl…” He tapped an index finger against his distinctive protuberance. Not many noses had been poked into as many rotten cases as Jacobsen’s had. Most likely Assad and Jacobsen were right. There was a connection. Carl sensed it himself.
    He mustered a semblance of authority in his voice, no easy matter on the wrong side of ten o’clock. “You’ll be taking over from here then, I assume.”
    “For the moment, yes.”
    Carl nodded. Now he could go back downstairs and mark the old arson case closed as far as Department Q was concerned.
    It would look good in the statistics.

    “Come and see, Carl. Rose has something to show you.” The reverberating voice made it sound like a troop of howler monkeys from Borneo hadappropriated the lower chambers. Assad certainly had no problems with his vocal cords, that much was plain.
    He stood beaming, clutching a ream of photocopies. As far as Carl could make out, they weren’t case documents. More like blowups of something fragmentary that at best could be described as blurred.
    “Look what she did.”
    Assad pointed down the corridor at the partition wall the joiner had just put up in order to contain the asbestos contamination. Or rather, he pointed to where it ought to have been visible. For both the wall and the door in it were completely covered with photocopies that had been meticulously put together to form one single image. If anyone wanted to come through, they would need a pair of scissors.
    Even at a distance of ten meters, it was clear that this was an enormous blowup of the message in the bottle.
    HELP
, it read, spanning the entire width of the corridor.
    “Sixty-four sheets of A4, no less. Great, is it not, Carl? These are the last five in my hand here. Two hundred and forty centimeters high and one hundred and seventy wide. Big, yes? Is she not clever?”
    Carl stepped a couple of meters closer. Rose was on her knees with her backside in the air, sticking Assad’s copies into place in the bottom corner.
    Carl considered first her backside, then the work the two of them had produced. The enormous blowup had its advantages and its drawbacks, that much was obvious straightaway. Areas where the letters had been absorbed into the paper were a blur, whereas others containing practically illegible, spidery handwriting that the Scottish forensics team had tried to reconstruct suddenly became meaningful.
    The upshot of it all was that at a stroke they now had at least twenty more legible characters to add to the puzzle.
    Rose turned toward him for a second, ignoring his little wave and dragging a stepladder out into the middle of the corridor.
    “Get up there, Assad. I’ll tell you where to put the dots, yeah?”
    She shoved Carl aside and positioned herself in the exact spot where he had been standing.
    “Not too hard, Assad. We need to be able to rub them out again.”
    Assad nodded from on high, pencil at the ready.
    “Start underneath ‘HELP’ and in front of ‘he.’ My eye makes out three