Christmas Eve, Thursday, December 24, and Christmas Day, Friday, December 25, 2020
Christmas Eve was not proving to be a joyful day in Department Q’s makeshift office at Maurits van Bierbek’s house.
They had lost all contact with Gordon and were consumed with worry. Rose was in a state of shock and constantly blamed herself. Why had she not immediately raised the alarm when she realized that Gordon was not there when she came to take over his watch? If she had, they would have probably been able to procure a search warrant for Sisle Park’s house, and they might even have found her there and brought the whole sorry saga to an end. With luck they could have also forced out of her where she was keeping Maurits van Bierbek. Someone in the police was bound to have helped them, because one of their own had been kidnapped in the line of duty.
Carl could feel Rose looking at him with a hint of reproach. But if they had raised the alarm, it would inevitably have caused no end of problems for all of them, and it would not have helped Gordon one bit. Quite the contrary. Carl would have been arrested, and the others would have faced serious consequences—possibly even leading to them losing their jobs.
It really was a terrible dilemma.
“I’m breaking into her house,” said Assad. “There’s no stopping me this time.”
“I don’t think it’ll help Gordon when Sisle Park finds out about it. And if you don’t find the exact address where van Bierbek is being held, or what’s happened to Gordon, it wouldn’t make much sense anyway, would it?”
Assad looked despondent. It was obvious that he was feeling exhausted. They all were.
“Have you contacted your families to wish them merry Christmas?” asked Carl. They both smiled tiredly. He had not been in contact with Mona either since they had gone into hiding. She had been the one to ban him from contacting her. But he was tempted to give in.
“I called Gordon’s parents,” said Rose. “Gordon usually talks a lot with them in the run-up to Christmas, so they must’ve thought it odd that he hadn’t been in touch. They are the type who might raise the alarm with the police, so I thought we’d better nip it in the bud. I told them that he’s in love with a woman at the moment, so they shouldn’t worry that he hasn’t called them.” She let out a deep sigh. “His mother had certainly not expected to hear that news, and she sounded so happy about it that it was almost embarrassing. I feel ashamed, but what else could I do?”
There was shouting coming from the living room below. Maurits van Bierbek’s two daughters naturally had their own frustrations to deal with. The younger sister was crying, and Laura was yelling at their mother. What else could one expect? It was Christmas Eve without the trimmings: no presents, no family, no dad. And someone had to take the blame.
“Give me some ideas,” said Carl. “We need to think out of the box. You’ve been looking for someone called Debora, Assad. Did you get anywhere?”
“I don’t think there’s any hope there, Carl.”
“I feel completely numb. Obviously Gordon can’t get in touch with us, or he would’ve done it ages ago. I simply can’t shake that thought,” said Rose quietly. “Do you think she might have killed him already?”
When had they last seen Rose welling up? Carl could not remember.
“No, I don’t think so. That would be out of character for Sisle Park, Rose. She doesn’t kill random people. She has a plan. And with everything we’ve learned about her mental state, we can be sure she won’t stray from it. And we didn’t find any salt close to Gordon’s car, did we?”
Rose tried to look relieved, but she was not convincing. “There was no salt in van Bierbek’s driveway when he was kidnapped either. And two of the cases only turned up salt when they were dug up.” She put both hands in front of her mouth and breathed deeply into them. Was she starting to panic?
He should not have mentioned the salt. Rose was right—it was irrelevant. “But listen, I’d be surprised if Sisle Park doesn’t reveal what’s going on with Gordon. She’s brazen and arrogant. And if we assume that she’s the one who’s kidnapped him, she will—”
“She is the one,” interrupted Rose.
“If that’s the case, I’m hoping that she’ll give us a heads-up about what she’s up to.”
“How is she supposed to do that when our phones are turned off? And she doesn’t even know where we are, Carl, so you can’t exactly expect a courier to turn up with a message, can you?” Assad looked at him with his big eyes. And he was unfortunately right.
Carl fumbled behind him for his coat, which he had thrown over the back of the sofa. “I’ll be quick,” he said, and he took out his phone from the pocket.
“Are you planning to turn that on? Are you out of your mind?” Rose shook her head. “This area has lots of towers. You’ve got no more than ninety seconds before they trace you, Carl. You can rest assured that they’re ready and waiting. Narcotics have endless resources when it comes to serious cases. If you want to check something, why don’t you use one of van Bierbek’s computers?”
“I just want to check if there are any messages or emails from her. It’ll only take a minute.”
He turned on the phone and counted the seconds while Rose and Assad tried to explain that police HQ were no doubt reading his emails anyway and so already knew if she had written.
“And you can be sure that they’ve also sent you emails bugged with spyware, so please don’t,” said Rose in vain. Carl just had to check.
It took him thirty precious seconds just to get the phone up and running. Despite Rose’s ardent protests, he opened his email account and was faced with an almost endless stream of emails. Emails from Marcus Jacobsen, emails from Sniffer Dog and his team, emails from his parents wishing him a merry Christmas, and at least ten other Christmas messages from family members, one email from Hardy and one from Morten, and lots from people who wanted to earn ten million kroner and believed that they had the one tip-off that would reveal the whereabouts of Maurits van Bierbek.
Carl began to sweat.
“You need to stop this, Carl. Now!” shouted Rose, but Carl did not stop.
“I just need to check my messages. It’ll only take a few seconds.”
But that was not the case. Far too many people wanted to get hold of him. Far too many Christmas-related messages. Some from people who sounded very worried about him. It was almost touching.
“Stop, Carl!” It was Assad, who stretched out his hand to grab the phone. A push of a button and he had turned it off.
“That was almost three minutes, Carl. Are you out of your mind? Your generation is simply so stupid when it comes to anything to do with the internet. Did you really have to download your emails when you could’ve just checked them on the computer here?” said Rose. “And where do you suggest we sleep tonight? Because you can rest assured that they’ve already traced where you are—and us for that matter.”
Carl stood up without a word and walked down to the living room, where Victoria was bracing herself to get in the Christmas spirit. Meanwhile, poor Roxan was darting around hanging up Christmas decorations—without making much of an impact in the oversized room. A plastic Christmas tree with electric lights had already been positioned on a huge Persian rug. If the situation had been different, it might have been tempting to dance around the tree.
“Excuse me, Victoria. We have a situation. We think that a lot of police cars will be arriving any minute to look for us. Unfortunately, we’ve got a terrible suspicion that the police might be mixed up in your husband’s kidnapping. What can we do to make sure they don’t find us?”
She straightened her blouse several times before being able to speak. “The police?” she exclaimed while looking like she had seen too many crime dramas. Everyone knew that corrupt police were the most dangerous people to mess with. She looked skeptical.
Had he taken it too far?
“There’s no need to be scared. They’re not after you,” he said to appease her.
“But why would the police do that to Maurits? I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry about that just now. I’ll explain later. Do you have somewhere we can hide where they won’t find us? They’ll probably have a dog unit with them.”
She looked terrified. How was she supposed to fool them if they brought dogs?
Once again, it was Laura who came to their rescue. She had clearly been listening and did not find Carl’s explanation very believable, but she smiled as if this was the coolest thing that could happen on a totally ruined Christmas Eve.
“There’s an ATV Hunter quad bike out back. Dad uses it to race around the grounds. The dogs won’t be able to trace you on that. We’ll just say that you all popped by to ask a few questions.”
Carl took charge of the situation. In just four minutes the team gathered all their things to make their getaway—just as they caught sight of the blue flashing lights dancing in the distance.
“This is not a Christmas I’m going to look back on fondly,” said Carl as he started up the quad bike with Rose and Assad hanging on the back as best they could, with all their stuff in tow.
“But you’ll never forget it, Carl,” said Assad in an attempt to cheer him up.
After a few minutes they had reached a sheltered spot behind a windbreak, and Carl wasted no time in removing his SIM card from his Samsung and scrolling through his texts while the other two looked on.
“I think you should drop the text messages, Carl,” said Rose. “It’s more likely that she would send an email, because it’s the simplest thing in the world to set up an almost untraceable email account.”
Carl sighed. The sheer number of unread emails seemed insurmountable. “Will I even be able to read them without the SIM card?”
Rose nodded. She was familiar with his phone settings.
Most of the emails in Carl’s inbox had no subject or, even worse, it was the same old subject from an old email thread that had never been updated, so it was impossible to know what the new email was about. Bloody annoying. Some people never bothered with a subject—and especially not those who were only out to get him. Unfortunately, they were in the majority.
“Don’t waste time on those emails, Carl. Some people just jump to conclusions,” said Assad half an hour later. He pointed at the blue flashing light that rose up into the sky in the distance and then disappeared.
Carl nodded. If this was the depressing Christmas far from home in the back of beyond, he hardly dared to think how the new year would pan out once he had turned himself in.
“Stop!” Rose grabbed Carl’s wrist and stopped him from scrolling. “That one. Try to open it, Carl,” she said, pointing.
He looked at the subject: “Answer to your inquiry.”
Carl opened it and revealed an email with two photos on the page.
It felt as if the dark, cold winter penetrated them to the core in that instant. The white mist from Assad’s mouth stopped. Rose tightened her grip around Carl’s wrist. And Carl moved the phone right up to his face in an attempt to grasp exactly what he was looking at.
The text was to the point:
Stay away if you want your colleague back alive!
They were all glued to the photos that accompanied the text.
“Oh god, no!” exclaimed Rose.
The first photo was taken from behind the two men, who were each sitting on a metal chair. The quality was good, so there was no mistaking that one of them was Gordon and that his hands were secured to the chair with cable ties. And it was equally obvious that the other person, who was slumped forward in the chair, had a piece of metal armor around his body that was secured with chains to the ceiling.
The second photo showed the two people from the front. Gordon was staring straight at the camera with a strange expression of hatred and defiance. His eyes were tired and bloodshot, but they still exuded a spark of danger that did not bode well for whomever it was unleashed on.
“Thank god! He hasn’t given up,” said Rose, relieved.
But Carl did not share her relief, because no matter how indomitable Gordon was, he was not the master of his own fate. If Carl and the others heeded Sisle Park’s warning to stay away, Maurits van Bierbek was sure to be dead in less than forty-eight hours. And if Gordon witnessed the deed, why would she let him live?
Carl was convinced that Sisle Park had no intention of allowing them to stop her, and he was just as convinced that Maurits van Bierbek would not be the last person she killed.
Carl stared intently at the images. Was there any way these photos could help them? He doubted it, because Sisle Park did not appear in any of them—and so they still did not have irrefutable evidence that she was behind it all. So even though they knew what she was up to, and even if she wiped Gordon from the face of the earth, only one thing would stop her in carrying on with her insane endeavor: her death. Carl was convinced that was how her mind worked.
“We can’t see the details on this lousy small screen, Carl. We need to get back to van Bierbek’s house and enlarge them as much as we can.”
“So you really think there might be something on these photos that can help us identify where they are, Rose? I just don’t think Sisle Park is that stupid.”
They waited until well after dark before they got on the quad bike and slowly made their way back to the house, trying to be as quiet as possible.
They could see through the garden window that the Christmas tree lights were still on, and a small pile of wrapping paper on the floor was the only evidence that at least there had been some sort of Christmas celebration.
“I heard you coming,” whispered Laura from one of the second-floor windows. “You can come in. The police are long gone.”
She ran out to meet them and immediately started telling them what had happened when the police were there.
“Mom was crying the whole time, saying that you had been here against her will and taken off on Dad’s quad bike. She was actually really good—I was so impressed. She lied and cried and if I hadn’t known any different, I would have believed her.” She laughed. “Now at least I believe her when she says she’s an actress.”
“What did the police do when she said that?”
“They searched the whole house. They found the hair dye in the bathroom. So they might be looking for you with red hair—but I did tell them that you’d already washed it out.”
Carl nodded. If that was possible, he would do it on the spot.
“The dogs were onto your scent the entire time, but they lost it about fifty meters from the house. It all added up with Mom’s explanation, so they believed her and made her promise to contact them immediately if you came back.”
“Do you think she would?”
“Not after you told her that the police were involved in Dad’s kidnapping. Just before she went to bed, she said that if they returned she’d kick their asses.” Laura laughed so hard she cried. She obviously really wanted to see that.
“What did they say about me?” asked Carl.
“They said that you were dangerous, that you’re a drug smuggler and involved in the deaths of people here and abroad. That you have to be captured before you can do any more harm.”
Carl exhaled heavily. What proof did they have for all this shit?
The large screens revealed many details they had not been able to see on Carl’s phone.
The room where van Bierbek and Gordon were being held seemed to be newly renovated. The steel runners on the ceiling were shiny, and the walls were painted an even white. There were no scratches or marks on the concrete floor or the far wall. The elevator had shiny, double-steel doors.
“Maybe it’s just been built?” suggested Rose.
“Yes, or it’s never been used. What do you think those runners on the ceiling are for?”
“It’s hard to tell, but I don’t think they’re part of the original interior.” Rose pointed at the chains hanging down from the runners. “This is her satanic invention, I’m sure of it. The victims can move—but not as freely as they want to. Look at the bolt up there on the runner. It prevents her prisoners from moving more than a few steps. It could be a runner controlled remotely to transport goods from the elevator into the room,” she suggested.
“No, I don’t think so, because there would have needed to be more of them,” said Assad.
They spent a long time looking at every small detail on the photos: van Bierbek’s drooping jaw, the veins showing under the skin on his hands, his emaciated body, and his shoulders exuding despair and resignation. The chair he was sitting on was the same type as the one Gordon was on. An industrial steel construction that could withstand anything.
“Who uses chairs like that?” asked Carl. “Some kind of machine shop?”
“Look at the legs. There’s a small metal plate welded onto them so they can be bolted to the floor. Judging by the rust, the metal plates have always been there.”
“Where would someone need solid chairs bolted to the floor?”
“I’m thinking a machine shop like Oleg Dudek’s. I’ll call his foreman and ask if he recognizes them,” said Assad.
While Carl and Rose continued scrutinizing the photo showing the captives from behind, Assad went over to the far end of the office and called from the landline.
“What else can you see, Rose?” asked Carl.
“It’s a freight elevator. I’ll enlarge that area of the photo.” She pointed at the double steel doors and a logo that was barely visible.
Carl squinted. He would give anything just now for a pair of super-strong reading glasses. “Do you agree that it doesn’t look totally new?”
Rose nodded and changed to the photo showing Gordon and Maurits van Bierbek from the front. Rose enlarged the photo as much as possible without compromising the detail.
“Focus on the floor and then up the far wall and back along the ceiling, Rose,” said Carl.
Rose began by focusing on the floor. Apart from the stains around van Bierbek’s chair that showed how often he had wet himself and where the stains closer to him became increasingly darker, there was nothing of note.
“You can tell how his urine has grown more concentrated,” said Carl. “He’s obviously heavily dehydrated—perhaps to the point that he’s dying. But I still think that Sisle will keep him teetering on the edge until the day she plans to kill him.”
Rose moved the focus to the end wall, which was completely devoid of any distinguishing marks. No electric sockets, no old nails or screws that could give away the age of the room. No furniture or decoration.
“Now focus on the ceiling,” said Carl. “You can see that the runners don’t go all the way down to the far wall, so you might be right in saying that they were added later with the sole purpose of keeping the prisoners in position. They’re definitely not for moving goods.”
“If the two previous murders from 2016 and 2018 of Franco Svendsen and Birger von Brandstrup were committed here—in contrast to all the earlier murders from Bobo Madsen and the riding accident in 2014 and back—this is probably a place that Sisle acquired in 2016 or not long before that,” said Rose.
“So you think that Sisle Park acquired this place sometime between Bobo Madsen’s and Birger von Brandstrup’s deaths?”
“Yes, sometime between 2014 and 2016.” She stopped and looked at him for a moment. “This could prove difficult to establish if we don’t get help from Marcus Jacobsen and Co. It’s Christmas Day, Carl. We might only have twenty-four hours left.”
Carl nodded. They had to get to the bottom of it. “Try to move back along the runner on the ceiling again, Rose.”
They did not dare even blink as they scanned the shiny steel runners. They were bolted to the ceiling with stainless steel brackets that stuck out on both sides and were attached to the ceiling with industrial screws.
“I think there are ball bearings inside the runners,” said Carl, “so that the sliders attached to the chains can move easily.”
“So you think van Bierbek has been able to move around in the room before he became too weak?”
“I don’t know. I guess the bolt in the middle of one of the runners would have made it difficult.” Carl shook his head. The woman was not only raving mad, she was also an all-out sadist. That was becoming increasingly evident.
They began to inspect the photo at two centimeters farther along from the bolt. Rose froze. “Wait! Can you see those marks on one of the runners? What do you think they are?”
Carl did not know. “Something appears to have been wrenched into the runner. Maybe to make the slider fall out.”
Rose tilted her head to get a better angle and nodded. “Of course. Van Bierbek has attempted to wrench one of the sliders out of the runner.”
“But how? Is he a contortionist or something?”
“Carl, look at that!” Rose peered so closely that her nose almost touched the screen. “Here, right behind the marks. The manufacturer’s name is embossed in the runner.”
“I’m afraid I can’t see that, Rose.”
“Well, it isn’t very clear, but I think the second word is ‘Steelware.’ ”
She zoomed in even more but zoomed out again when it did not help. “The first three letters are ‘Mex.’ Does it say ‘Mexita’? It sounds like a terrible pop song from the eighties.”
Carl googled the name, and the result sent a shiver down his spine. He pointed at the website.
“Do you think this might be helpful, Carl?”
“Maybe,” he said hesitantly.
“Are you getting anywhere?” asked Assad from behind them. “I certainly am. I woke up Dudek’s foreman—who sounded like he had a real hang-up.”
“A real hangover, Assad,” said Rose.
Assad frowned. “Well, what she said. Anyway, he sounded really out of it. But I sent him a close-up of the chair van Bierbek is sitting on, and he saw straightaway that it is similar to the chairs that were bolted to the floor in front of some of Oleg Dudek’s machines. He said that all the inventory and tools from the factory were auctioned off when Dudek died and the factory went under.”
Rose and Carl stared at him in disbelief.
Even though Sisle Park did not appear in the two photos, this new information confirmed a link between the scene in the photos and the earlier crimes of the supposed serial killer.
There was no way Marcus Jacobsen could ignore this.