Mercy Read Free Page A

choice?
    ‘Marcus, there’s money attached to this.’ He paused for a moment as he fixed his eyes on his boss. ‘Not a lot, but enough to keep one man on salary and at the same time pump a couple of million kroner into our own department. It’s an extra appropriation that’s not meant to displace anything else.’
    ‘A couple of million?’ He nodded appreciatively. ‘OK, now you’re talking!’
    ‘Brilliant, isn’t it? We can set up the department in no time, Marcus. They’re expecting us to dig in our heels, but we won’t. We’ll give them an accommodating response and propose a budget that avoids earmarking any specific tasks. And we make Carl Mørck the head of the new department, but there’s not going to be much to be in change of, because he’ll be on his own. And at a safe distance from everyone else, I can promise you that.’
    ‘Carl Mørck as head of Department Q!’ The homicide chief could just picture it. A department like that could be easily run on a budget of less than a million kroner a year, including travel expenses and lab tests and everything else. If the police requested five million a year for the new department, there’d be enough left over for a couple more investigative teams in the homicide division. Then they could concentrate mainly on older cases. Maybe not Department Q cases, but something along that line. Fluid boundaries, that was the key to the whole thing. Brilliant, yes. Nothing short of brilliant.

4
    2007
    Hardy Henningsen was the tallest person who had ever worked at police headquarters. His military records reported his height as six feet, nine and a half inches. Whenever they made an arrest, it was always Hardy who spoke, so that the perps had to lean their heads way back while their rights were read to them. That sort of thing made a lasting impression on most people.
    Right now Hardy’s height was not an advantage. As far as Carl could tell, his long, paralysed legs never got stretched out full length. Carl had suggested to the nurse that they cut the footboard off the bed, but apparently that was not within her realm of expertise.
    Hardy never said a word about anything. His TV was on 24/7, and people kept coming and going in his room, but he didn’t react. He just lay there in the Hornbæk Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries, trying to survive. Attempting to chew his food, to move his shoulder a bit, since that was the only part south of his neck over which he had any control, and otherwise allowing the nurses to wrestle with his unwieldy body. He merely stared up at the ceiling as they washed his groin, stuck needles in him, emptied the bag collecting his waste products. No, Hardy didn’t have much to say any more.
    ‘I’m back at headquarters again, Hardy,’ said Carl, straightening the bedclothes. ‘They’re working full blast on the case. They haven’t discovered anything yet, but I know they’re going to find out who shot us.’
    Hardy’s heavy eyelids didn’t even flicker. He didn’t bother to glance at Carl or at the TV news programme on Channel 2 that was filling airtime with a hyped-up report about the eviction of the kids squatting at the Youth House. He seemed indifferent to everything. Not even anger remained. Carl understood him better than anyone else. Even though he wasn’t about to show it to Hardy, he didn’t give a fuck about anything either. It was completely irrelevant who’d shot them. What good would it do to find out? If it wasn’t one person, then it was somebody else. There were plenty of arseholes like that running around.
    He nodded curtly to the nurse who came in with a fresh IV drip. The last time he’d been here, she had asked him to step outside while she tended to Hardy. She didn’t get the response she was expecting, and it was clear that she hadn’t forgotten.
    ‘So, you’re here again?’ she said sullenly, glancing at her watch.
    ‘This is a better time for me, before I go to work. Is that a problem?’
    Again