The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel (16 page)

Two pages was all it came to. Probably not enough. Again, he was having difficulty concentrating. Maybe it would help once he received the supplementary material from the meeting in Rotterdam. There had to be someone at HQ who could translate that bristly language.

He shook his head.

Help? Like hell it would.

The only way he was going to get any peace of mind was to raise the curtain on the second act of his Mona drama. And it had better be more constructive than the first.

He dialed her work number. Predictably, someone else answered. In a fit of innovation Mona had moved her practice a couple of months earlier into a shared clinic, the only snag being that callers always had to go through the secretary, a young woman who apparently considered herself as competent a psychologist as those who conducted their therapy in the rooms behind her desk.

“I’m afraid Mona Ibsen isn’t available at the moment, she’s with a client. Well, maybe he’s not a client, but the fact is, the sign on her door says she’s in a session.”

He’d give her
some facts next time he stood leaning against her counter.

The fact is! He had hardly put down the phone before the ugly and inappropriate feeling came over him that Mona might have had a hidden agenda in giving him his marching orders.

Could she have been running around with other men while he’d been trawling the streets in search of a wedding ring? Had he missed the signals?

No, Mona wasn’t like that. If she’d met someone else she would have told him.

Nevertheless, a nasty sense of betrayal crept over him. It was a feeling he hadn’t known since he was twelve. Not since that blistering summer day when he had caught sight of his one and only childhood flame, Lise, posing at the water’s edge at the outdoor swimming baths. All of a sudden, there she was in a low-cut bathing suit with taut, suntanned thighs, and light-years away from him. They had grown up together, been blushing almost-sweethearts, and suddenly her beckoning smile was turned in the direction of others. And when finally she noticed him, her smile changed. In one second she had become a woman and he had been left behind, humiliated, still imprisoned within the body of a boy.

It had taken him at least ten years to rid himself of that feeling of desolation in which she had left him, and now here he was again, sidelined, left on his own. It wasn’t jealousy but something deeper, more painful.

“For Christ’s sake, man,” he said to himself. “You can’t do without her. And when did
that
happen?”

They heard the stamp
of Rose’s approaching footsteps and braced themselves. Time to face the music for yesterday’s blunder. How could he have said that about her father? He knew it was a touchy subject.

“Take it easy, Carl. I had a nice chat with Allah this morning. This will be a fine day,” Assad assured him.

Amazing, how well connected the man was.

“Right, come on, you two,” were Rose’s first words. Her eyes were sparkling and she seemed her old self. “I’ve got a little surprise for you.”

It was clear she was expecting protest, so she turned on her heel and marched off again in a manner that defied disobedience.

Apart from her nose peeling after her tour of Brumleby, the lass was on the top of her form. Assad still had his injuries to contend with, and Carl’s lack of sleep and tar-clogged lungs served likewise to slow their tempo. Both were already gasping for breath as they reeled past the duty desk out into HQ’s courtyard in time to see Rose striding over Hambrosgade toward the parking spaces across the street.

No tour van could have been better suited to the name scrawled across its sides in barbed-wire lettering. The sight of this spray-painted wreck must have been a joy for death metal fans, with its fiery red flames licking from bumper to bumper.

Daggers & Swords from Malmö had definitely gone all out.

Rose pulled the sliding door open with a clonk and indicated for them to get in.

Hard to believe, but there sat Sverre Anweiler, his pasty face nodding
darkly in their direction. He gestured toward the bench opposite his own and produced three cans of beer that he shoved over to them without a word.

“I’ll run through this quickly,” said Rose. “Sverre has to be getting on. He’s off to Århus in ten minutes, got a ferry to catch.”

Carl sat down, shifting a guitar case against the wall and pulling Assad down next to him. Here was the man Interpol had been yearning to find for more than a year. From the heap of a vehicle in which they now sat there were only a hundred meters to the headquarters of the Danish National Police, and next door to it Copenhagen’s police HQ with Lars Bjørn and his rapid response unit. What made him think he was going to be allowed to drive off to Århus, just like that?

“I actually figured Anweiler was probably in Malmö, so I was going to take the train over there this morning. But then I checked Daggers and Swords’s tour schedule and found out they played up in Hørsholm last night,” Rose explained, sounding rather pleased with herself. “So I called the promoters and asked them if they knew where the band was now. And wouldn’t you know it, they were still having breakfast at Hotel Zleep in Ballerup. They’d had a bit of a late night, apparently, so they were running late.”

“I thought she was a groupie when she called,” the Swede added, in something that apparently was supposed to resemble Danish.

“I did sound a bit eager, didn’t I?” Rose sniggered.

Carl responded with a frown. When they were done here they would have to have a word with her about the inappropriateness of calling up murder suspects wanted by Interpol and making appointments to meet. There was only one procedure in a situation like this, and that was to go out and arrest the bloke.

“Rose filled me in on the situation, and to be honest I was appalled. I didn’t even know about it,” the human leftover went on. “Tragic thing to happen, but I can assure you I had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

Quite articulate for a Swede.

“I wouldn’t expect you to say anything different,” replied Carl.

“I know, but I’ve been off traveling all this time, so I had no idea. I
haven’t been in Sydhavnen since I sold the houseboat, but I was actually thinking of stopping by the new owner to see if everything was all right once I got the time.”

“I can confirm we’ve seen evidence to suggest you’ve been away, but how do we know for sure?” asked Carl.

“Well, I’ve got all kinds of stuff I brought back with me. Receipts, photos and all sorts of things. It’s all in the apartment in Malmö. All you had to do was ask.”

Carl nodded. “OK, if what you’re saying here is really true, then it makes you a little less of a suspect. So far so good. But perhaps you can tell me what might have been on that houseboat that could have caused such a huge explosion? A bit hard to account for, isn’t it?”

Anweiler turned something in his hand. It looked like some tubes from an old radio, or maybe something that belonged to one of the amplifiers in the back of the van. It was the morning after the night before, and the Swede’s dull eyes were underscored by heavy shadows. There was something melancholic about the expression on his face and the hard-boiled accessories he’d decorated himself with, the pierced ears, the tattoos crawling up his neck, his shaved head.

“I don’t think it is, actually,” he replied matter-of-factly.

A peculiar feeling of relief and clarification spread through the van and its clutter of studded black leather and polished boots.

“I did the boat up ready for her. Varnished the floors a few times, treated all the woodwork. There was a bit of leftover varnish and teak oil down below in the old engine room. I told her I still needed a day to put everything in order, but she said she’d be sure to do it herself and remember to air the place out, too. It suited me fine.”

“So what you’re saying is that she forgot and all that stuff ignited itself? But if that was really what happened, the fire investigation would have reached the same conclusion. Plus they’d have found remnants of the containers at the bottom of the harbor.”

“No, because the varnish and wood oil were in plastic buckets.” He looked distressed about it. “It was probably a combination of that and something else. I should have thought about it when I was showing her around the boat. She did seem a bit preoccupied. Just kept saying yeah
to everything I was explaining, without looking like any of it was really sinking in.”

“What about the gas stove?”

“No,” he said, with a sad look. “I was thinking more about the generator.”

“Down in the engine room, was it?”

Anweiler nodded slowly.

“Tell you what, Anweiler, why don’t you and I pop over the road and explain to my boss what you’ve just told us?”

He gave a shrug, reminding them he’d already said he was in a hurry and had to catch a ferry.

But Carl knew better. The unwillingness to cooperate that he saw was an ex-con’s implicit mistrust, the ingrained doubt that he would be listened to with an open mind.

They hadn’t been born yesterday.

—

It was a heavy trudge to the third floor, and the Chivas Regal in Carl’s hand felt anything but sufficient.

Farewell reception
, read a note on the door of the cafeteria. They might just as well have written
Department A’s demise
or
Dangerous criminals’ victory celebration
.

Nothing would ever be the same as it had been under Marcus Jacobsen. Why the flaming hell did he have to go and retire now? Couldn’t he at least have waited until Carl threw in the towel, too?

Ms. Sørensen, the formidable Department A secretary, had risen to the occasion and baked cakes of such leaden substance that only those truly ravaged by hunger would dare set their teeth into them. Lis had inserted little Danish flags into the icing. And underneath all the disposable tumblers with hardly anything to fill them up with—it was during working hours, after all—someone had gone to the trouble of using his best handwriting to decorate the tablecloth with the sorely inappropriate words: “Enjoy your retirement, boss. Thanks and farewell. Long live Department A.”

The commissioner’s speech was brief and avoided all the pitfalls her
long and often acrimonious association with the homicide chief might otherwise have caused her to stumble into. For that reason, too, it was surprisingly devoid of content. Lars Bjørn, on the other hand, spoke almost exclusively of what he was planning to carry over from Marcus’s leadership, and, more to the point, what he wasn’t.

When he had finished, only Gordon went up and shook the idiot by the hand. In return, Bjørn beamed at him and slapped him on the back, an unexpectedly accommodating gesture.

They put their heads together and exchanged some words. The rookie and the homicide chief to-be. What on earth did they have to talk about in such confidence? Wasn’t Gordon just an annoying law student who’d been given the chance to get a whiff of what life was like at the sharp end of the legal system?

Or was he simply Bjørn’s man?

If he was, then maybe he was more than just a horny idiot with a penchant for loopy women with kohl around their eyes.

“I’m watching you, you lanky bugger,” he said under his breath, turning to send his boss of many years a comforting smile. If Marcus Jacobsen were to change his mind now, Carl hoped he would kick Bjørn’s ass back to Afghanistan, from where it had just returned.

“You deserved a better send-off than the speeches you got there, Marcus. I’m really sorry,” Carl proffered, self-consciously handing him the whisky bottle in its crappy cardboard box. “No one could ever wish for a better or more competent boss than you’ve been,” he said in a clear, resounding voice, so not a single person present, including the commissioner and Lars Bjørn, could be in any doubt.

For a moment Marcus Jacobsen stared blankly at Carl, then, mustering a smile, he put the gift down on the table and gave Carl an exceedingly warm embrace.

No doubt it would be the only one all day.

Thus came twenty years of service at police HQ to an end. There was no big fuss. One day they were here, the next they were gone. It all went a little too smoothly.

Carl for one wasn’t expecting fanfares when his turn came. It suited him fine.

—

With a heavy heart Carl issued a couple of directives to Rose and Assad before slumping down at his desk to wrap up the Anweiler case with the obligatory report.

Their conclusion was that the fire was an accident and that the worst that could happen to Sverre Anweiler was a minor fine for having neglected to properly dispose of inflammable materials before handing on the boat to the new owner.

It was a sad and not particularly exciting or prestigious case for Bjørn to present to the press, but a good one for Marcus Jacobsen to bow out on. Last case solved, thank you and good night. There were no doubt other investigations during his long career that had been far from successfully concluded, which he would look back on without satisfaction. Like any other investigator in the homicide division he would just have to live with it.

An unconcluded murder case would keep gnawing away until death itself intervened.

Carl printed out his report and wrote
CONCLUDED
across the front page in block letters.

He stared at the word and began involuntarily to think of Mona again. Would it ever stop?

—

Carl and Assad stood in front of the array of cases covering the notice boards on their basement’s corridor wall. Though some had been cleared away during the last few months, more had unfortunately taken their place. In the latter period, under Marcus Jacobsen, Department A’s success rate had touched ninety percent, but in the rest of the country the picture was rather less flattering, a fact amply illustrated by the seeming disorder at which they now stared. Moreover, the past ten years had left its mark in other ways equally tragic. Inexplicable disappearances and deaths, most likely genuine suicides, also added to the clutter of documents on the boards, crisscrossed by Assad’s system of red and blue strings.

The blue strings joined cases that may have been related, however tenuously. The red strings joined those that seemed more obviously connected.

A colorful spiderweb of death and disaster. And then all the cases that were hanging there on their own.

“Plenty to get started on, Assad,” said Carl.

“My words exactly, Carl. Like minds think greatly.”

“It’s the opposite, Assad. Great minds think alike, OK? But, yeah, I reckon we’re thinking the same thing: Can we really be bothered with yet another dubious case? A missing person from ages ago?”

“But still, Carl. I think Rose deserves it. She has just cleared up a case on her own.”

“Yeah, but that one never even made it up on the wall here, remember?”

“Nevertheless, then, I think we should put this one up, Carl.” He smiled wearily but roguishly, just like the Assad of old. A bit more peppermint-tea soup, a touch more bone-penetrating Middle Eastern caterwauling on the CD player, a few more twinkles in his eye and daily doses of linguistic befuddlement, and the man would be back in business.

“You reckon so, do you?” Carl gave a deep sigh. This wasn’t a day where his defenses were fully functioning, Mona being at the end of his every train of thought. “In that case, you can give her the news yourself, OK?” The overpowering manner in which Rose sometimes responded to such gestures made him heedful. She wasn’t necessarily the one he needed a close encounter with just now.

He tumbled onto his chair and tried to pull himself together. A couple of deep hits on his first ciggie of the day.

Why couldn’t he stop thinking about Mona? Goddamn it!

In no time at all his cigarette became ash, and uneasiness seemed to take a firmer hold with every drag. And then, out of nowhere, Rose was standing in front of him, coughing and wafting away the smoke with the missing persons notice in hand.

“Thanks, Carl,” was all she said, pointing at her little poster. No exuberant gush of elation that would knock him off his feet. Just a simple “thanks.” Coming from Rose, it spoke volumes.

She ignored his pained expression and sat down on one of the horrendous chairs she had once managed to sneak into his office.

“I’ve been looking into what might have happened to our missing person here, but that won’t surprise you, I’m sure.” She jabbed a finger at the photo of the red-haired William Stark. “The phone number on the notice is no longer in operation, of course, but I’ve found a new one, so we can get in touch with the girl who put it out.”

“OK. What is it exactly that’s got you so turned on about this case?” he asked.