Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen Read Free Book Online

is Danish, through and through,’ said the spokesman afterwards, as Merete greeted each delegate in turn.
    She shook Hale’s hand, noticing at once the blazing heat of his touch.
    ‘Daniel Hale, is that right?’ she asked.
    He smiled. For a moment her gaze wavered. How embarrassing.
    She glanced over at her secretary, a neutral entity in the office. If Marianne had been there, she would have hidden a gleeful smile behind the papers she was always holding. There was not a hint of a smile from the new secretary.
    ‘You work in a laboratory?’ Merete asked.
    At that point the spokesman broke in. He needed to make use of the few precious seconds allocated to him. The next delegation was already waiting outside Merete Lynggaard’s office, and no one ever knew when there’d be another chance. It was a matter of money and a costly investment of time.
    ‘Daniel owns the finest little laboratory in all of Scandinavia. Well, it’s not really little any more, since you acquired the new buildings,’ he said, turning to speak to his colleague, who shook his head with a smile. It was a delicious smile. ‘We’d like to be allowed to submit this report,’ the spokesman continued, turning back to Merete. ‘Perhaps as chair of the Health Committee you’d be willing to study it in depth when time permits. It’s tremendously important for posterity that the issue be given the most serious consideration at once.’
    She hadn’t expected to see Daniel Hale down in the Snapstinget restaurant. She was even more surprised to see that he seemed to be waiting for her. On every other day of the week she ate lunch in her office, but each Friday over the past few years, she would join the chairpersons from the health committees of the Socialist and Radical Centre parties. All three of them were feisty women who could make the members of the Denmark Party see red. The mere fact that they so openly cultivated their coffee klatsch didn’t sit well with a lot of people.
    He was alone, half hidden behind a pillar, perched on the very edge of his Kasper Salto chair, with a cup of coffee in front of him. Their eyes met for a second as she came through the glass doors, and it was all Merete could think about the whole time she was there.
    When the women got up after finishing their conversation, he came over to her.
    She saw people looking at her and murmuring to each other, but she felt mesmerized by his gaze.

8
    2007
    Carl was more or less satisfied. The workmen had been busy all morning in the basement room, while he’d stood outside in the corridor, making coffee on one of the rolling tables and tapping one cigarette after another out of the pack. Now carpeting covered the floor of his so-called office in Department Q, and the paint cans and everything else had been tossed into gigantic plastic rubbish sacks. The door was back on its hinges, a flat-screen TV had been brought in, a whiteboard and a bulletin board had been hung up, and the bookshelves were filled with his old law books, which other people had thought they could commandeer. In his trouser pocket was the key to a dark blue Peugeot 607, recently decommissioned by the Intelligence Service because they didn’t want their bodyguards riding behind the queen’s royal vehicles in a car with scratches in the paint. The Peugeot had only forty-five thousand kilometres on it, and was now the sole property of Department Q. What a status symbol it was going to be in the car park on Magnolievangen. And no more than twenty yards from his bedroom window.
    In a couple of days he’d have the assistant they’d promised him. Carl had got the workmen to clear out a small room directly across the corridor. The room had been used for storing the battered helmets and shields used by Civil Defence Forces during the riots that erupted over the closing down of the Youth House. Now the space held a desk and chair, a broom cupboard, and all the fluorescent tubes that Carl had thrown out of his own