Free A Conspiracy of Faith by Jussi Adler-Olsen

the partition wall. “Come on, we’ll get this out of the way before she gets back.”
    “We?”
    Carl nodded in acknowledgment. “You’re right, Assad. Best you do ityourself. Move it all on to the other wall next to your string and all those cases you’ve been sorting out. Just make sure there’s some space in between, OK?”

    Carl sat for a while, considering the original message with a certain degree of attention. Though it had by now passed through a number of hands, and not all of them had treated the material as possible evidence in a criminal investigation, it never even occurred to him not to bother wearing his white cotton gloves.
    The paper was so very fragile. Sitting alone with it now gave rise to a quite singular feeling. Marcus called it instinct. In Bak’s terminology it was “nous.” His soon-to-be ex-wife would say it was intuition, a word she could hardly pronounce. But whatever the fuck it was, this little handwritten letter set all his senses alight. Its authenticity was glaringly obvious. Penned in haste, most likely on a poor surface. Written in blood with the aid of some indeterminable instrument. A pen, dipped in blood? No, the strokes seemed too irregular for that. In some places it was as if the writer had pressed too hard, elsewhere not hard enough. He picked up a magnifying glass and tried to get a feeling for the paper’s irregularities, but the document was simply in too poor a state. What once had been an indentation the damp had most likely turned into a blister, and vice versa.
    He saw Rose’s brooding face in his mind’s eye and put the document aside. When she returned in the morning, he would give her the rest of the week to grapple with it. Then if nothing transpired, they would have to move on.
    He thought about getting Assad to brew him a cup of that sickly sweet goo of his, only to deduce from the mutterings in the corridor that he hadn’t yet finished cursing over having to run up and down the ladder and keep shifting it all the time. Carl wondered whether he should tell him that there was another ladder exactly the same in the storeroom next to theBurial Club, but frankly he couldn’t be arsed. The man would be finished in an hour anyway.
    Carl stared at the old case file concerning the arson in Rødovre. Once he had read through it one last time, he would have to kick it upstairs to the chief so he could file it on top of the alp of cases that already towered on his desk.
    An arson in Rødovre in 1995. The newly renovated tiled roof of a select whitewashed premises on Damhusdalen had suddenly collapsed in on itself and the blaze had consumed the entire upper floor in seconds. In the smoldering ruins a man’s body had been found. The owner of the property had no idea whose corpse it was, though a couple of neighbors were able to confirm that lights had been on in the attic windows all night. Since the body remained unclaimed, it was assumed the victim had been some intruding derelict who had failed to exercise proper care with the gas appliance in the kitchenette. Only when the gas company informed police that the main line into the house had been shut off was the case turned over to the Rødovre Police’s homicide section, where it languished in the filing cabinet until the day Department Q was brought into being. There, it might quite conceivably have led an equally anonymous existence had it not been for Assad latching on to that groove in the bone of the little finger on the victim’s left hand.
    Carl reached for his phone. He pressed the number of the homicide chief, only to wind up with the misery-inducing voice of Ms. Sørensen instead.
    “Very briefly, Ms. Sørensen,” he began, “how many cases—”
    “Is that you, Mørck? Let me put you through to someone who doesn’t cringe at the mention of your name.”
    One of these days he would make her a gift of some lethally poisonous animal.
    “Hello, darling,” came the sound of Lis’s buoyant