The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel (21 page)

Marco extracted himself from the bushes and wandered farther up the road, past gaudily painted homes that only made him feel dirtier inside.

He had to do something. Even though it would hurt her a lot to learn the truth, she needed to know. He felt he owed it to her. Which was why it had become necessary to go to the police, even if it meant sacrificing his father.

—

The next morning he rummaged through the wardrobe of women’s clothes and found a checkered shirt better than the one he had, and more or less his size. He took a Windbreaker from the hall and went down into the basement, where he pulled his clean underwear and socks out of the drier.

He considered himself in the bathroom mirror and nodded. He looked so decent all of a sudden, certainly tidy enough for what he had to do. All he needed now was a little cash, and that was the hard part.

If only he could sell off the clothes that Stark would definitely no longer be needing, his financial problems would be somewhat alleviated. But he knew no one who bought secondhand clothes or everyday china and furniture. No one wanted analog TV sets anymore, or computer towers or hi-fi systems, and nobody would ever buy the other knickknacks. So while it may have resembled a perfectly average Danish home, it contained absolutely nothing that could be sold for money. Danes simply adored spending money, so anything that was more than a few years old quickly became worthless.

Maybe it was better this way. The only things he had stolen in a long
time were a few clothes and half a jar of pickled gherkins, and he wanted it to stay that way.

He walked round the house for five minutes in his bare feet just to savor the soft, ticklish feeling of plush carpets and imagine what it would be like to have a home of his own, surrounded by things he owned and was fond of.

When he came to the safe, the uneasiness rose up inside him again. He got down on his knees and peered inside to see if he could still remember the code.

He could.
A4C4C6F67
.

The enigma of it made him smile briefly, and then he suddenly realized the letters and the figures were not all written in the same way, but in different pairs of black and gray. The way the morning light slanted into the room made it obvious now.
A4
was bold and black.
C4
was lighter and rather more fuzzy, as though the pen had almost run out. Looking closer, he could see that
C6
and
F6
and
7
had apparently also been added at different times. So the code had gradually been extended. He sat down on the floor, leaning against the safe as he pondered the problem. Behind the sequence lay perhaps a series of separate actions rather than just one.

He let himself out through the back door, standing for a moment on the patio to take stock.

If there wasn’t a bike he could borrow in the shed, he would have to walk the whole way.

But there was.

—

His first stop was a library in Brønshøj, the closest to his route. He sat there reading for some time, close to the counter where he could keep an eye on who came in. Some went straight to the adults’ or children’s section, others first returning books they had borrowed. The latter were the ones he was waiting for because part of the process of returning books entailed scanning their national identity cards.

He picked out a boy his own age. Like most other young Danes, he
lacked respect for the value of material things and was careless with his possessions. Marco watched as the boy slipped his ID back into his wallet, which he then casually stuffed into the open front pocket of his shoulder bag. Before long, the bag was lying on the floor at his feet while he surfed the Internet on one of the computers.

Marco approached slowly, and when the adjoining computer was vacated he sat down, silent as a cat, and typed in a Web address off the top of his head.

An hour later he parked the bike a couple of streets from his destination. Strictly speaking it was stolen, even though he was intending to return it.

Bellahøj police station on Borups Allé was rather bigger than he had anticipated, monumentally menacing and loathsome to the eye. Gray concrete surfaces, people endlessly coming and going. Marco couldn’t help feeling defenseless as he went inside.

Considering he had spent his entire life in the shadow of criminal activity, it felt more than a little strange that the first time he ever entered a police station, or even came in contact with the law, was something he was doing voluntarily. No one so much as looked at him as the automatic doors opened, and he walked in almost sideways in order not to expose his face to the cameras above the entrance. He gazed around the place in wonder. The duty desk was a study in streamline procedure and surprisingly devoid of drama. Neat sky-blue shirts and black ties all round, and most of the officers he saw were young.

Apart from Marco, only two women sat on the benches, waiting for their turn. As far as he could make out, one of them had had her bag snatched while the two were cycling together. Its contents had obviously been important to her, since she was sobbing and seemed to be in a state of shock.

It didn’t make Marco feel any better as he sat on the edge of the bench, trying to memorize what he was going to say when his turn came.

When eventually he was called forward, he placed Stark’s African necklace on the counter together with one of his missing persons notices.

The duty officer stared at them, slightly disoriented.

“The necklace belonged to the man in the picture,” Marco began, keeping an eye on the two officers who sat farther back behind the counter, typing away at their computers.

At this point he’d intended to say he had been given the necklace by a friend of his, and that this friend knew the man was dead and where he was buried. That this friend had told him who might have killed him and disposed of the body. And then he was going to say that his friend was too afraid to come in person, whereupon he would hand the officer the ID he had stolen from the boy at the library to “prove” that his friend existed. The boy would of course be unable to help the police if they contacted him, but at least they would have this to go on. And Marco they would never see again.

Only things turned out differently.

“Do you have any ID, son?” the officer asked.

It was a development Marco had not anticipated. Had he known, he would have stolen
two
cards, not one.

“You understand what I’m asking you for, don’t you?” the officer added.

Marco nodded and placed the ID on the counter.

The officer studied it for a moment.

“Thank you, Søren,” he said. “The way things work here, we’re going to have to speak to your parents because legally you’re what’s called a minor. So if you give me their mobile number, I’ll give them a quick call before we do anything else. Then they can be present while you tell us about it, all right?”

Marco’s brain went into overdrive. “I’m sorry,” he said, clutching at straws. “I can’t remember their phone numbers ’cause they’re always changing them. My mobile has their numbers, but it’s being repaired.”

The officer smiled. “That’s OK, Søren, I know what you mean. I’ll just look them up from your address here.” He indicated the ID card and rolled his chair over to a computer.

A second later he raised a finger in the air. He’d found them.

Marco backed away toward the entrance as the cop picked up the phone. It was all going wrong.

And as the duty officer waited for the reply, he looked up at Marco again and immediately sensed something was amiss.

“Hey, where you going, kid?” he asked, raising his voice.

At that moment Marco heard footsteps from the corridor behind the duty desk and a plainclothes policeman appeared, greeting a uniformed colleague and sending a shiver down Marco’s spine. It was the policeman he had seen through the window of Stark’s house only three days before, and this time their eyes met.

“All right, Carl, good to see you, too,” the officer said in return.

This was when Marco made a run for it, through the glass doors and away.

A cry went up behind him, commanding him to stop, and as he legged it past the parking lot two officers stopped in their tracks and stared open-mouthed. Before they had a chance to realize what was happening he was over the fence that ran alongside the building, tearing across a lawn and over another fence. A hundred meters farther on by the next road, Stark’s bike was parked outside a kindergarten, and seconds later he was pedaling hell for leather toward the city, choosing the narrowest, most inaccessible side streets he could find.

It had all gone wrong. He hadn’t been able to tell them where Stark’s body was buried or who had killed him. Almost even worse: he had been seen by the policeman who had spotted him outside Stark’s home.

Marco swore in as many languages as he knew.

Knowing the police as he did, they would not stop there. Before he realized it, they, too, would be after him. He only hoped that for all his caution he had not been caught on their CCTV.

Now you’ve got to find a place in the city to hide out where they won’t find you, and where you can keep an eye on them all, he told himself. Once he had found the place he would have to wait and see what happened before trying to retrieve his money from Kaj and Eivind.

Reaching the junction of Jagtvej and Åboulevard, he paused to consider his options, none of which were without peril. The issue was where he could best keep an eye on them in relative safety. Østerbro or the city center?

He stood for a moment straddling the bike and then made his decision. At four o’clock Miryam and the others would be picked up by the van at Rådhuspladsen. If he kept his distance he would be able to see who had been sent out to steal and who’d been sent out searching for him.

At Rådhuspladsen he looked around the square for a place to leave the unlocked bike without the risk of someone taking off with it. It was a tall order, considering this was perhaps the busiest place in all of Denmark.

And then, right next to the Tivoli Gardens, an enormous renovation project loomed up in front of him. He had seen it countless times before without ever properly having registered what it was.

Not until now.

His housing problem was solved.

Carl had been feeling
lousy all weekend. Mika and Morten had thrown a party 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 the neighbors from number 56 were definitively down 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 vacation 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, 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 capital that he channeled 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 canceled it. Malene Kristoffersen told me he took home some jewelry 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 sure they even 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 jewelry 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 spiderweb,” 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 take 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 effing 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 two weeks back in the days of yore and it was two weeks too many.

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 was 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 damn 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 notice board, 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 lawnmower, too, but it was all left untouched.”