Disgrace by Jussi Adler-Olsen Read Free Book Online Page B

arrives,’ Yvette Larsen said, smiling insistently, and afterwards Martha wept softly as Assad explained why they had come.
    They drank tea and ate cake before she gathered her wits to speak.
    ‘My husband was a policeman,’ she finally said.
    ‘Yes, we know that, Mrs Jørgensen.’ It was the first time Carl spoke to her.
    ‘One of his old colleagues gave me copies of the case file.’
    ‘I see. Was it Klaes Thomasen?’
    ‘No, not him.’ She wheezed, and with a deep drag on her cigarillo quelled a coughing fit. ‘It was someone else. Arne he was called. But he’s dead now. He gathered everything in a folder.’
    ‘May we have a look at it, Mrs Jørgensen?’
    She raised a nearly transparent hand to her head, her lips trembling. ‘I’m afraid not. I don’t have it any longer.’ Her eyes narrowed. Apparently she had a headache. ‘Idon’t know who I loaned it to last. Quite a few people have had a glimpse at that folder.’
    ‘Is this it?’ Carl handed her the pale green folder.
    She shook her head. ‘No. It was grey, and it was much bigger. It was impossible to hold in one hand.’
    ‘Are there other materials? Anything you can let us have?’
    She glanced at her friend. ‘Can we tell them, Yvette?’
    ‘I don’t really know, Martha. Do you think we should?’
    The ailing woman fixed her deep-set blue eyes on a double portrait on the windowsill, resting between a rusty watering can and a tiny sandstone figure of St Francis of Assisi. ‘Look at them, Yvette. What did they ever do?’ Her eyes grew moist. ‘My little ones. Can’t we do it for them?’
    Yvette placed a box of After Eight mints on the table. ‘I suppose we can,’ she sighed, and moved towards the corner where old, crumpled-up Christmas paper and recyclable, corrugated cardboard boxes were stacked: a mausoleum to old age and those days when scarcity was an everyday word.
    ‘Here,’ she said, pulling out a Peter Hahn box, stuffed to the brim.
    ‘Over the past ten years Martha and I have added newspaper clippings to the files. After my husband died, it was just the two of us, you see.’
    Assad accepted the box and opened it.
    ‘They’re about unresolved assault cases,’ Yvette went on. ‘And the pheasant killers.’
    ‘The pheasant killers?’ Carl said.
    ‘Yes, what else would you call people like that?’ Yvette rummaged around a bit in the box to find an example.
    Yes, pheasant killers did seem a fitting description. Standing together in a large PR photo from one of the weeklies were a couple of members of the royal family, some bourgeois riff-raff and Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen, Ditlev Pram and Torsten Florin – each holding a broken-open shotgun, with one foot triumphantly planted before scores of dead pheasants and partridges.
    ‘Oy,’ Assad exclaimed. There wasn’t much more to say on the matter.
    They noticed something stirring in Martha Jørgensen, but couldn’t tell where her agitation was leading.
    ‘I won’t stand for it!’ she suddenly cried out. ‘They must be got rid of, every single one of them. They beat my children to death and killed my husband. To hell with them, I say.’
    She tried to get up, but instead fell forward under her own weight, crashing forehead first against the edge of the table. It seemed almost as though she hadn’t noticed.
    ‘They, too, must die,’ she hissed, with her cheek on the tablecloth. Then she proceeded to lash out with her arms, knocking over the teacups.
    ‘Calm down, Martha,’ Yvette said, ushering the gasping woman back to her stack of pillows.
    When Martha got her breathing under control and once again sat passively puffing on her cigarillo, Yvette led them into the dining room next door. She apologized for her friend’s behaviour, explaining that the tumour in her brain was now so large that it was hard to know how she would react. She hadn’t always been that way.
    As if they deserved an apology.
    ‘A man came to visit and told Martha he’d known Lisbetwell.’