18
Carl had been feeling lousy all weekend. Mika and Morten had thrown a party on Saturday evening, partly to celebrate their publicly confirmed cohabitation, partly to blow a portion of the outrageous sum of money Morten’s Playmobil collection had fetched on eBay.
‘He got sixty-two grand!’ Jesper had exclaimed at least a dozen times, while they busied themselves putting little umbrellas into cocktail glasses. He was already wondering if he could make an earner out of his retired Action Men in the attic.
Sixty-two grand. Christ on a bike!
It was for this reason that the wine and beer, not to mention the contents of a large number of glitzy-looking bottles of spirits, flowed more copiously than Carl could remember ever having occurred at his end of Rønneholtparken. By ten o’clock Ken and the neighbours from number 56 were definitively out for the count, and the only ones besides Carl who kept afloat until after midnight were Morten and Mika and a pair of their rat-arsed, dance-crazed gay friends.
Finally, when Carl was dragged to his feet to dance for the umpteenth time by a forty-year-old bloke in tight trousers and a leather hat coquettishly angled on his head, he staggered resolutely past a ruddy-faced, heavily sleeping Hardy and made for his bed.
The host couple were engaged in a slow and intimate dance at the foot of the stairs.
‘Damn shame about Mona,’ Mika slurred, giving him a pat on the shoulder.
‘Yeah,’ Morten added. ‘We’re gonna miss her.’
How many times had he ever even seen her? Twice?
Were they expecting him to thank them for cheering him up?
He awoke on Sunday with a taste in his mouth like dead rodent. His head was ablaze with both a hangover and qualms of conscience, but worse than that was a more than latent feeling of being at odds with himself.
‘Goddammit, you’re not going to lie here feeling sorry for yourself, Carl Mørck,’ he growled to himself, though to little avail. The more his head pounded, the more certain he became that people such as Lars Bjørn and especially Mona Ibsen had to be direct descendants of Tycho Brahe or others who always brought only bad luck.
A couple of hours passed during which he lay packed inside his duvet, shivering and sweating in turn, now full of wrath, now meek as a mouse.
You’re not going to get over this until you speak to her, he told himself over and over again. But his mobile remained untouched as those downstairs began to stir, then spill outdoors into the blessings of the month of May.
And then he fell asleep again, staying in his bed until another Monday morning threatened.
‘Assad,’ he yelled. ‘Get in here a minute, will you?’
No reaction.
Was he splayed out on that prayer mat again with his head turned to Mecca? Carl looked at his watch. No, he couldn’t be, not yet.
‘ASSAD!’ he tried again, at full volume.
‘He’s not come back yet. Don’t you listen to anything, or has that hangover of yours made you deaf?’
Carl looked up at Rose, who stood in the doorway, scratching the last of the peeling skin off her nose. ‘Back? From where?’
‘Stark’s bank.’
‘What the hell’s he doing there?’
‘He’s been in touch with the probate court, too, and the tax authorities.’
Why the hell couldn’t she ever just answer a question? Was it a rule now that he had to drag every little piece of information out of her?
‘What are you two up to this time? You’re hiding something from me, Rose, I can tell.’
She gave a shrug. ‘I’ve been on the phone with Malene Kristoffersen. As luck would have it, she and her daughter just got home from a holiday in Turkey a couple of days ago.’
‘OK. Can you get her in here, do you think?’
‘I reckon so. Sometime tomorrow, maybe.’
Carl shook his head. ‘Hallelujah. Not exactly keen, then, or what?’
‘Sure she is. She could have been here in a couple of hours, but Tilde’s at the hospital all day for a check-up, so I thought we should give them a bit of breathing space till tomorrow.’
‘All right, then. But what’s it got to do with what you and Assad are up to?’
‘You’ll find out when he gets back.’
He turned up five minutes later, his hair looking like an explosion in a mattress factory, a sure indicator of his level of activity.
‘Carl,’ he began, breathlessly. ‘After Rose and I spoke to Stark’s girlfriend, she and I both felt something was not quite right.’
Really? Why wasn’t Carl surprised?
‘Rose said Stark had helped her daughter, Tilde, with some very expensive treatment over the course of about five years before he disappeared. In fact, he spent a lot more money on it than he had.’
‘But there was Stark’s inheritance, remember?’
‘Yes, Carl. But that was not until 2008, the year he went missing. This was a hundred years before, as far back as 2003. At the bank we could see he spent nearly two million kroner more than he had saved up. At first I thought he must have borrowed the money and paid back the loan with the money he inherited, but not so.’
His curly-haired assistant’s eyes narrowed the way they did only when a new, meaty case tickled his fancy. Carl gave a sigh. What a way to start the week.
‘OK, so tell me about Tilde’s treatment and this money, Rose.’
She unfurled her tightly folded arms, the prelude to what was bound to be a longer briefing than necessary.
‘Tilde suffers from a nasty inflammatory disease of the bowel called Crohn’s disease. It means her intestines are in a chronic state of infection. Malene explained to me that William Stark took an enormous interest in her illness and spent loads of money on alternative treatment when the usual methods, like surgical removal of infected sections of the bowel or cortisone treatments, didn’t have the intended effect.’
‘Thanks, but you’re avoiding the question, Rose. Where does the two million enter into it, and how? It’s a lot of money, I’d say, even for medical treatment.’
‘Malene told me Stark was obsessed with finding the ultimate treatment for the disease, even though it can’t be cured. Tilde’s been treated at private clinics in Copenhagen and in Jacksonville in Florida. On top of that she’s had homeopathy in Germany and acupuncture in China. He even paid to have her infected by living parasites from the intestines of pigs. Everything imaginable to the tune of two million kroner, according to Malene’s estimate, over the five or six years they were together before Stark went missing.’
‘Two million. If she’s telling the truth, which we don’t know.’
‘Oh, yes, Carl.’ Assad dropped a pile of transaction slips onto the desk in front of him. ‘It’s all there. Stark had his bank transfer the amounts from his account.’
‘OK. So what am I supposed to deduce from this?’
Rose smiled. ‘That Stark was a wizard at poker, or got exceptionally lucky at the casino. What else?’
Carl frowned. ‘I detect some sarcasm, Rose. But can you actually prove he didn’t get the money like that?’
‘Let’s just say that Stark raised a lot of a capital that he channelled on without accounting for where he got it,’ Rose replied.
Carl turned to Assad. ‘What about the tax authorities? Rose says you’ve been in touch with them. They must have known about all this income.’
Assad shook his head. ‘Negative, Carl. They had nothing registered in the way of increased income during the period in question, and Stark was never called to explain. So it seems they knew nothing about these transactions because the deposits were only in his account for a few days before the exact amount was paid out again. The balance at the end of the year was never higher than at the end of the year before.’
‘And because he was a regular wage earner he was never picked out for a routine spot check, I imagine. Am I right?’
Assad nodded. ‘There was something else that bothered me, too. The safe-deposit box he rented. I began to wonder why he cancelled it. Malene Kristoffersen told me he took home some jewellery from it, his parents’ wedding rings and some other items. But then Rose asked her what had become of these things.’
‘Yeah, I asked her if she had them in her possession. But she said she’d never actually seen them, and I believe her. That was why the items were never reported stolen when they had the break-in. She was simply unable to describe them. She wasn’t even sure they existed, let alone had been stolen.’
‘Stark could have rented a safe-deposit box in another bank and stored them there.’
Assad shook his head deliberately. ‘I think not, Carl. Malene believed that the jewellery existed, and if it wasn’t stolen, he must have found a really good spot to hide it in the house. She said she was still hoping he would come back and retrieve them.’
Carl noted the first wrinkle of a frown being born between Assad’s eyebrows. His assistant had never been one for blind optimism.
‘Can you see what we’re getting at, Carl?’ said Rose. ‘The whole thing stinks!’
Was she gloating, or was it commitment that made her face light up like that? Carl had never quite been able to tell the difference.
‘This case is like a spider’s web,’ she went on. ‘Malene loved William Stark, and he certainly loved her and her daughter. He’d have done anything for them. Then all of a sudden he disappears just like that, and Malene says he hadn’t the slightest reason for doing so.’
‘Then what makes her think he might come back? If he really had no reason to vanish, then most probably he’s dead, in which case he’s hardly likely to come back, is he?’ said Carl. ‘Maybe she’s got a screw loose, or else the opposite. Maybe she’s the one who made him disappear. We don’t know for certain if he actually made it all the way home the day he came back from Africa. Are we quite sure of her movements leading up to his disappearance?’
Assad sat fidgeting and looked like he was miles away, so it was Rose who answered.
‘Forensics went through the house with a fine-toothed comb. Dog units were out and everything. The garden hadn’t been dug up for ages and there was no sign of recent home improvements or DIY jobs. So if his body was there, or still is, it means something must have really gone wrong for them two and a half years back.’
‘Y’know what?’ said Assad, suddenly. ‘Unless he had ten million lying around in a cardboard box and Malene nicked it all, he’d be worth more to her alive. As far as I can see, this is about something else entirely. This is about a man who should have been in Africa for several days, but then he changes his plane ticket and flies back to Denmark ahead of time. Why did he do this? Did he have something to sell? Did his money come from illegal diamond trafficking and he was supposed to meet someone here in Denmark who then did away with him? Or was it an accident? Did he become ill and fall in the marsh? This I do not believe, because it was trawled thoroughly.’ He shook his head. ‘There are too many possibilities here, I think. Another thing is that he was afraid of water, it says so in the report, so he wouldn’t have ventured too close under any circumstances. So what happened after he left the airport? If only we could find out where he went.’
Carl nodded. ‘Rose, next time you speak to Malene I want to be there, OK? Until then I want you to check out her background. Talk to her colleagues. Ask around at the hospital where Tilde was being treated when Stark went missing. What were these people’s impression of Malene? Stark, too, for that matter.’
He turned to Assad. ‘And Assad, I want you to go through those bank slips and check if the dates when Danske Bank transferred large sums for Stark can be connected with any criminal activities that occurred just before the withdrawals that can’t otherwise be linked to Stark. I’m talking about all kinds of things: narcotics, robberies, smuggling, whatever.
‘Any other piffling little jobs we can assist you with?’ asked Rose. ‘How about we sort out Kennedy’s assassination or maybe square the circle while we’re at it?’
Assad smiled and dug his elbow into Rose’s side. Pair of bloody comedians.
‘There is actually one more thing I’d like to say before I ride out to Bellahøj and have a chat with the lads who investigated the break-in at Stark’s place.’
Rose gave Carl a look of resignation. What now?
‘Dear friends. This is a festering boil of a case you’ve got your teeth into. Well done, both of you.’
One could have heard a pin drop.
‘Rattlesnake’ was what they called Deputy Chief Inspector Hansen. He received Carl with a pair of piercing, slanting eyes and a characteristic whistle of air issuing from between his front teeth. Totally without enthusiasm. They had patrolled together for a fortnight back in the days of yore and it was one fortnight too much.
Now Hansen was the man they sent out when ten cars had had their paint jobs scratched on some quiet residential street, or at best when someone had done a couple of decent break-ins in the district. Decent was hardly the word to describe the job that had been done on Stark’s place, but since the house had been sealed at the time in connection with an ongoing investigation, Hansen had been instructed to be meticulous so any indications of the burglary and Stark’s disappearance being linked could be properly uncovered.
‘Why didn’t you just use the phone?’ Hansen asked, without taking his eyes off the report he was reading.
‘If I’d known it was you who was working this case, I’d have sent a telegram.’
A smile of microscopic dimensions creased Hansen’s lips. ‘My name’s on the bloody report, or haven’t you read it?’
‘There are a whole lot of nice people who are called Hansen. Who could have suspected it was you?’
Hansen looked up. ‘Still the charmer, eh, Carl?’
‘Joking aside, Hansen, I’ve got the report here from the first search of the house after Stark’s disappearance. Comparing it to yours, it strikes me there apparently wasn’t so much as a butter knife taken in the later break-in. But that can’t be right, can it? Straight up, just how thorough were you when you went through the place after that break-in? Are you sure there was nothing missing? A shoebox, a sheet of paper off a noticeboard, a basket from the shed?’
‘As you can see in the report, I brought along William Stark’s lady friend and one of the lads from HQ who’d been there the first time. We went through the place together, yes, quite thoroughly I’d call it. The attic, all the drawers, the basement, the garden, all over. There wasn’t a thing missing. They could have nicked a decent pair of speakers and some silver cutlery and the motor mower, too, but it was all left untouched.’
‘What about fingerprints?’
‘There weren’t any.’
‘Professional job, then?’
‘So we reckon. Like I said, it’s all in the report,’ Hansen replied drily. ‘The neighbour’s description of the perpetrators wasn’t worth much, I’m afraid. It was anything but precise. One of them was a bit darker than the others, she said, but not as dark as Africans or Pakistanis, and not like Turks or Arabs either. So basically, it could have been anyone.’
OK. That was what the neighbour had said to Hansen. The question now was whether Carl could get anything more precise out of the woman.
‘And what exactly does this report of yours conclude regarding the nature of the break-in and its motivation? As far as I can see, it doesn’t say a thing.’
‘I only write facts, Carl. We can’t all go around telling fairy tales like you.’
‘Right now you’re not writing anything, you’re talking to me, so give it a try. What’s your conclusion, Hansen? I need the opinion of a burglary expert.’
Hansen sat up a bit straighter in his chair and stuffed his sky-blue shirt into his trousers. Clearly, he wasn’t a man used to dealing with compliments.
‘Could just have been someone who read about the case in the papers and saw an easy job in an empty house. Pretty common these days. Funeral notices in newspapers are a case in point. Might as well just tell people there’s no one in. Then you’ve got all the morons who post their holiday plans on Facebook and other places. When the cat’s away the mice will play, as the saying goes.’
‘Any other ideas?’
‘The alternative is someone looking for something in particular. To be honest, I think that’s your best bet.’
‘Why would that be?’
‘Because the thieves only concentrated on certain places in the house even though they were there more than an hour. It was as if they’d been there before.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Because otherwise, dear Carl, everything in the drawers would have been scattered all over the place. Instead, they immediately started slashing mattresses and sofa cushions and pulling the furniture out from the walls to see if there was anything behind it. Makes one think they were already familiar with the place.’
This was just what Carl wanted to hear. He thanked Hansen and headed for the duty desk. Next stop would be Stark’s neighbour. He wanted a description of the thieves from the horse’s mouth.
But then something happened instead.
The moment he stepped into the desk area, exchanging brief hellos with a former colleague, he saw a boy standing by the entrance.
Carl realized it wasn’t the first time he’d looked into those eyes.
What the … was all he managed to think before the lad made a break for it, through the entrance doors and away, the duty officer calling out after him.
Carl began running too, and just managed to see him disappear over the perimeter fence and head off towards Hulgårdsvej.
His cries to stop were in vain.
‘Who was he?’ he asked the duty officer.
The policeman gave a shrug and handed him an ID card.
‘Søren Smith.’ Carl tilted his head. ‘Hmm, he didn’t look much like a Søren to me.’
‘No, he didn’t. Trace of an accent too, I’d say. He could have been a late adoption, of course. I’m about to give his folks a call. Maybe they know what was bothering him. Oh, and he just managed to dump these things on the counter. Not sure they’re his, though. Might belong to someone who’d done something he wanted to report to the police.’
He pointed towards a necklace and a poster of some kind.
Carl felt his jaw drop.
‘Well, fuck me,’ he almost whispered.
He put a hand on the duty officer’s shoulder. ‘No need to make that call. I’ll get over to the family straight away. And I’ll take these with me, OK?’
The house was unusually neat compared to most others in Copenhagen’s Nordvest district. Who would have thought that behind the rose hedge in this industrial-looking area with its urban planner’s nightmare of heterogeneous blocks of flats and anarchistic lattice of plots of land would be found such an idyllic little thatched cottage?
The woman who opened the door, however, looked rather less idyllic and was certainly not used to strangers ringing her doorbell.
‘Yes?’ she inquired hesitantly, eyes scanning Carl as if he were carrying bubonic plague.
He pulled his badge out of his back pocket. As could be expected, the effect it had wasn’t comforting.
‘It’s about Søren. Is he in?’ he asked, knowing full well he probably wasn’t, seeing as he’d only just left the police station.
‘He is, yes,’ the woman replied anxiously. ‘What’s this about?’
Jesus! The lad must have had a bike parked nearby, otherwise there was no way he could have got home so fast. ‘It’s nothing serious. I’d just like to have a word with him, if you don’t mind.’
She ushered him inside into the front room, wringing her hands and calling for the boy a couple of times before eventually darting up to his room and dragging him away from his computer and downstairs again under vociferous protest. Separating a teenager from his favourite toy wasn’t easy, Carl knew the problem all too well from back home.
A run-of-the-mill Danish youngster with hair the colour of liver paste wriggled free of her grip. It was not the boy he was looking for, not by a long chalk.
‘I think you lost something,’ Carl said, handing him his national identity card.
The boy took it reluctantly. ‘Yeah, I did. Where’d you find it?’
‘I’d rather ask you why you don’t have it yourself. Did you lend it to someone?’
He shook his head.
‘And you’re sure about that? There was a lad at Bellahøj police station half an hour ago using it for ID, saying he wanted to report something on behalf of a friend. That wouldn’t be you by any chance?’
‘No way. The card was in my wallet that got nicked out of my bag at the library in Brønshøj. And I’m pretty sure who took it. Have you got my wallet as well? There was twenty-five kroner in it.’
‘I’m afraid not. What were you doing there, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be in school at that time of day?’
The boy looked affronted. ‘We’re doing a project, if you know what that is.’
Carl looked at his mother, whose shoulders had gradually relaxed. He wondered if she took an interest in his school project.
‘What did this thief look like, Søren? Can you describe him to me?’
‘He had a checked shirt on and didn’t look Danish. Not black, more brownish, like he came from southern Europe. I’ve been to Portugal and he looked like a lot of the people there.’
Carl was certain. It was the same boy he’d seen at the police station and outside Stark’s house a couple of days before. So far, so good.
‘How old do you reckon he was?’
‘I dunno. I didn’t really look at him. He was just sitting at the computer next to mine. Fourteen or fifteen, maybe.’
It wasn’t the first time Carl had been inside the building that housed the public library on Brønshøj Square. He recalled the time his patrol car was sent out there to detain a drunk who had been playing frisbee with the library’s LP collection. And though it had been some years ago and the building had since been freshened up a bit, it still looked like the old Bella cinema that, like so many others around Copenhagen, had given up the ghost and been superseded by supermarkets and, in this case, a bank and local library.
‘I think you’ll need to ask Lisbeth. She stands in for our section leader sometimes,’ said the librarian at the counter. ‘She was on duty at the time you mention.’
Ten minutes passed before she arrived, but it was worth the wait.
Lisbeth sent sparks tingling down his spine. The kind of woman who recharged a man’s batteries at a glance. Mature and self-aware, with an astonishing forthright gaze. If Mona’s silly capriciousness turned out to be serious – and he most definitely hoped it wasn’t, even though the way he felt about her at the moment she could kiss a certain part of his anatomy – he knew it would not be the last time he paid a visit to this library.
‘We’re a bit short-staffed at the moment due to illness, so we’re all taking turns to lend a hand. I’ve only been assisting here for a month, so you want to show your colleagues you’re not afraid to give it a go.’
He was in no doubt she was able.
‘Yes, I do remember the boy you mention. In fact, I know him better than you might think. It’s actually quite odd to see him all the way out here in Brønshøj.’
‘You mean you’d seen him before, somewhere else?’
‘Yes. Normally I’m deputy head of the Østerbro branch on Dag Hammarskjölds Allé. He’s been coming there every single day for months.’
Carl smiled, partly because of what he’d just been told and partly because of Lisbeth herself, in equal portions. ‘Excellent. Perhaps you also remember what his name is.’
She shook her head. ‘He always came at different times each day and immediately sat down in one of the chairs to read, or else he’d go over to the computers. He never borrowed anything, so we never needed to see his ID.’
Carl stood completely still for a moment, trying to gauge what lay behind those candid blue eyes. Was she flirting with him or just surprised by the singularity of the coincidence?
‘He seems to be quite a fantastic boy. All of us at the Østerbro branch agreed we’d never seen someone his age so eager to learn. It became a kind of a sport for one of my colleagues to check what he’d been reading after he put the books back on the shelves.’
OK, so it must have been the boy she fancied.
‘What was he doing here in Brønshøj, then?’
‘He just turned up one day. Sat over there reading magazines, technical stuff, then went over to the computers. I don’t know how long he was there, because I swapped duties with one of the other librarians.’
‘Did things go missing from people’s bags a lot when you were at Østerbro?’
She baulked at the question. ‘Why do you ask? Do you suspect him of stealing? I’d have a hard time believing it, I can tell you.’
It was all Carl needed to know. If she couldn’t believe it, he certainly wasn’t going to destroy her image of the lad.
He shook his head. ‘This colleague at the Østerbro branch who was curious about what the boy was reading, I’d like to speak to her. Do you know where I can get in touch with her? Would she be at work now, do you think?’
‘Liselotte’s on maternity leave. But I can check and see where she lives if you want to call her. Just a minute.’
His eyes followed the gentle sway of her hips in her tight skirt all the way to the office. Christ, if only Mona would call tonight and tell him how sorry she was.
Liselotte Brix was most certainly pregnant. In fact, she was so pregnant he would have been unable to describe her body’s proportions without making a chauvinistic reference to her condition.
She received him with arms extended over her midriff, looking clearly dismayed in a home already fully equipped for the baby’s arrival. Packs of disposable nappies lined a shelf. The cradle, complete with canopy and battery-driven mobile, was ready and waiting in the corner. Apparently she wasn’t superstitious.
‘I do hope the boy hasn’t got himself into trouble. He was just so cute.’ She patted her distended navel. ‘If I knew what he was called I’d name this little terror here after him!’
Carl smiled. ‘No, we’re looking for him because we think he may have some important information in connection with a missing persons case.’
‘God, how exciting.’
‘Your colleague, Lisbeth, told me you used to check up on what he’d been reading.’
‘Yes, it was because he seemed to devour almost anything. And also because he never noticed how fascinated we were by him. It was really funny.’
‘Can you give me a couple of examples of things he read?’
‘Like I said, it was everything, really. At one point he was heavily into career choices and forms of education. Everything from “What Do I Want To Be When I Grow Up?” pamphlets to university admissions criteria or brochures on preparatory courses. All pretty advanced for a boy his age. Other times he’d be reading about Denmark and Danish society. Sociology, domestic politics, contemporary Danish history. Books on the Danish language, dictionaries. I remember once he spent time studying a handbook on Danish opera. There were books on Gypsies, the legal system, biology and maths. There were really no limits to his curiosity. He read novels, too, even the old Danish classics. And yet he never once borrowed anything to take home with him. Strange, don’t you think?’
‘What was the reason for that, do you reckon?’
‘I have no idea. But he was different, you see. A bit like an immigrant, but not like the other immigrant boys. I thought he might be a Gypsy, in which case his being so bookish was probably frowned upon at home.’
‘A Gypsy?’
‘Yeah, you know. That lovely brown skin colour, and all those black curls. But he could also have been Spanish or Greek. His accent was different, though, more American sounding, but he definitely wasn’t mulatto.’
‘OK.’
‘The odd thing was, his accent seemed to dwindle away. His Danish kept improving by the week and his vocabulary expanded all the time. It seemed totally autistic, the way he just soaked everything up.’
‘If I understand you right, there were never any adults with him. Was there anything else that might indicate where he belonged?’
‘Not really, no.’ Liselotte’s eyebrows gave a slight twitch. Most likely due to a kick from her baby. ‘He was just so cute, that’s all.’
‘Do you know if he still uses the branch on Dag Hammarskjölds Allé?’
‘Yes, he does. I talk every day with one of the girls who works there. Just this past week he hasn’t been coming much, but I suppose you can ask them yourself.’