Mercy Read Online Free PDF

Net to his heart’s content. No pesky rules about secure surfing and safeguarding the central servers; at least that was something. He looked around for an ashtray and tapped a cigarette out of the pack. ‘Smoking is extremely hazardous to you and those around you’, it said on the label. He glanced around. The few termites that might thrive down here could probably handle it. He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. There was definitely a certain advantage to being head of his own department.
    ‘We’ll send the cases down to you,’ Marcus Jacobsen had said, but there wasn’t so much as a single sheet of A5 paper on the desk, and all the shelves were empty. They must have thought he needed time to settle into the place. But Carl didn’t mind; he wasn’t about to work on anything until the spirit happened to move him.
    He shoved the chair sideways over to the desk, sat down, and propped his feet up on the corner. That was how he’d sat for most of the time he’d been off on sick leave. During the first few weeks at home he’d simply stared into space, smoking cigarettes and trying not to think about the weight of Hardy’s heavy, paralysed body or the rattling sound that Anker had made before he died. After that he’d surfed the Internet. Aimlessly, without any sort of plan, just trying to numb his mind. That was exactly what he intended to do now. He looked at his watch. He had just about five hours to kill before he could go home.
    Carl lived in Allerød, which had been his wife’s choice. They’d moved there a couple of years before she walked out on him and moved into a cottage in an allotment garden in Islev. She’d looked at a map of Zealand and quickly worked out that if you wanted to have it all, you needed plenty of dough in the bank – or else you could move to Allerød. Nice little town on the S-train line, surrounded by fields, with forested land ‘within walking distance’, as they say. It had lots of pleasant shops, a cinema, theatre, social groups, and, to top it all, the house was located in the Rønneholt Park development. His wife had been ecstatic. For a reasonable price they could buy a semi-detached house made from stacked-up breeze blocks with plenty of room for both of them, as well as her son. They would even have access to tennis courts, an indoor swimming pool and a community centre, all in the proximity of fields of grain, a marsh, and a hell of a lot of good neighbours. Because she’d read that in Rønneholt Park everyone cared about each other. Back then that hadn’t been a plus as far as Carl was concerned, because who the hell believed that sort of crap anyway? But later on it had turned out to be important. Without his friends in Rønneholt Park, Carl would have fallen flat on his arse. Both metaphorically and literally. First his wife took off. Then she decided she didn’t want a divorce, but instead took up residence in the allotment garden. Next she went through a whole series of young lovers, and she had the bad habit of ringing Carl to tell him all about them. Then her son refused to keep living with her in the garden cottage, and in the full throes of puberty had moved back in with Carl. And finally there was the shooting out in Amager, which brought to a screeching halt everything that Carl had been clinging to: a solid purpose in life and a couple of good colleagues who didn’t give a damn whether he’d got out of bed on the wrong side or not. No, if it hadn’t been for Rønneholt Park and the people who lived there, he would have really been up shit creek.
    When Carl got home, he leaned his bicycle against the shed outside the kitchen, noting that the other two occupants of the house were both there. As usual, his lodger, Morten Holland, had turned the volume all the way up as he listened to opera in the basement, while his stepson’s downloaded blowtorch heavy metal was blasting out of a window upstairs. A less compatible collage of sounds was not to be found