The Absent One A Department Q Novel - By Jussi Adler-Olsen Page 0,3
doesn’t sound good,” Carl replied, dropping into a seat opposite his boss.
“Well, Carl, you’ll have visitors from Norway soon.”
Carl gazed up at him from under heavy eyelids.
“I’m told a five-person delegation is coming from Oslo’s police directorate to have a peek at Department Q. Next Friday at ten A.M. You remember, right?” Marcus smiled, blinking. “I’ve been asked to tell you how much they’re looking forward to meeting you.”
That sure as hell made them the only ones.
“With this visit in mind I’ve reinforced your team. Her name is Rose.”
At this, Carl straightened up a little in his seat.
Afterward he stood outside the homicide chief’s door, trying to lower his arched brow. It’s said that bad news comes in clusters. Bloody right it does. At work for only five minutes and he’d already been informed that he’d have to serve as mentor for a new employee. Not to mention act as some kind of hand-holding guide for a herd of mountain apes, which he’d happily forgotten all about.
“Where is this new girl who’s supposed to be joining me?” he asked Mrs. Sørensen, who sat behind the front desk.
The hag didn’t glance up from her keyboard.
He knocked lightly on the desk. As if that would help.
Then he felt a tap on his shoulder.
“Here he is in the flesh, Rose,” someone said behind him. “May I introduce you to Carl Mørck.”
Turning, he saw two surprisingly similar faces. Whoever invented black dye hadn’t lived in vain, he thought. They both had tousled, coal-black, and ultra-short hair, with jet-black eyes and somber, dark clothes. The resemblance was damned uncanny.
“Blimey! What happened to you, Lis?”
The department’s most competent secretary slid a hand through her previously elegant blond hair and flashed him a smile. “I know. Isn’t it pretty?”
He nodded slowly.
Carl shifted his attention to the other woman, who stood on mile-high heels. She gave him a smile that could have taken anyone down a peg. Once again he glanced at Lis, noting the striking likeness between the two women, and wondered whose image had inspired whom.
“This is Rose. She’s been here for a few weeks, cheering us secretaries up with her infectious humor. Now I’ll entrust her to you. Take care of her, Carl.”
Carl stormed into Marcus’s office with his arguments at the ready, but after twenty minutes he realized he was fighting a losing battle. He managed to win a week’s reprieve and then he would have to welcome the girl down in Department Q. Right beside Carl’s office was the utility closet that housed lengths of traffic spikes and equipment they used to cordon off crime scenes. Marcus Jacobsen explained how it had already been cleaned and furnished. Rose Knudsen was his new colleague in Department Q, and that was final.
Whatever the homicide chief’s motives were, Carl didn’t like them.
“She received top marks at the police academy, but she failed the driver’s test, and that means you’re done for, no matter how talented you are,” Jacobsen said, spinning his swollen cigarette pack around for the fifteenth time. “Maybe she was also a little too thin-skinned to work in the field, but she was determined to join the police, so she learned how to be a secretary. And she’s been at Station City for the past year. Then the last few weeks she’s been Mrs. Sørensen’s substitute, who of course is back now.”
“Why didn’t you send her back to City, if I may ask?”
“Why? Well, there was some internal hullabaloo. Nothing that relates to us.”
“OK.” The word “hullabaloo” sounded ominous.
“At any rate, Carl, you now have a secretary. And she’s a good one.”
He said that pretty much about everyone.
“She seemed very, really nice, I think,” said Assad under the fluorescent lights in Department Q, trying to make Carl feel better.
“She started a hullabaloo down at City, I’ll have you know. That’s not so nice.”
“Hulla…? You’ll have to say that one more time, Carl.”
“Forget it, Assad.”
His assistant nodded. Then he gulped a substance smelling of mint tea that he’d poured into his cup. “Listen to this, Carl. The case you put me on top of while you were away, I couldn’t get very far with. I looked here and there and all impossible places, but the case files have all gone missing during the moving mess upstairs.”
Carl looked up. Gone missing? No shit? But all right—something good had happened today, after all.
“Yes, completely gone. But then I looked a little through the piles of folders and found this one. It’s very interesting.”