The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel (48 page)

—

Marco was silent most of the way back to police HQ, and Carl understood him well.

Judging by what the lad had told them, this had been the worst and the best day of his life rolled into one.

“What’s on your mind, Marco?”

He shook his head.

“Why won’t Marco say anything, Assad?” he asked over his shoulder.

“I think perhaps he is trying to assess his situation at the moment,” came the reply.

Carl looked at Marco in the passenger seat. “Is that right, Marco? Are you wondering what’s going to happen now?”

The lad seemed smaller than ever.

“Is that it?”

Marco lowered his gaze and nodded his head slowly.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking that all the things I dreamed about are never going to happen. Now they’ll put me in a detainment center and then I’ll be thrown out of the country.”

Carl frowned and looked into the rearview mirror, where Rose and Assad were exchanging glances. Marco’s state of mind was clearly affecting them.

“That’s not at all certain, Marco,” Carl replied, trying to ease Marco’s mind. With his sparse knowledge of state policy regarding illegal immigrants, he realized this wasn’t much consolation.

“What would you do if you could decide for yourself?”

Marco sighed. “I just want to be completely ordinary. Go to school, study, look after myself.”

It wasn’t much to ask, and yet.

“You’re only fifteen, Marco. You’re too young to look after yourself.”

The boy turned his head to look at Carl with raised eyebrows. Of course I can, his expression said.

“Where would you live, Marco?” Carl went on.

“Anywhere. As long as I can be left in peace.”

“And you think things would work out? Without going back to crime?”

“I know it would.”

Carl looked out at the traffic crawling along Bispeengbuen, and at the surrounding buildings. Out there among the twinkling lights were thousands of human lives that failed to make the grade when society needed them. So what better chance did this boy have?

“What makes you think you’ll be able to take care of yourself when so many others can’t, Marco?”

“Because I have the will.”

Carl glanced into the rearview mirror again. The two of them were just sitting there, surprisingly passive. This wasn’t an easy situation to deal with on his own, dammit.

He took a deep breath and let out a sigh as he thought back to the look on Malene Kristoffersen’s face when they said good-bye, the way she’d stood there with William Stark’s last will and testament in her hand. It was a document that would change their lives significantly. Tilde would be able to continue her treatment, and they’d be given the freedom to do as they pleased.

All because he’d happened to have a lighter and lit a little bonfire.

Carl nodded and caught Assad’s eye in the mirror.

“Assad! That bloke you know, the one who’s good at forging identity papers, do you still have any contact with him?”

He felt a pat on each shoulder, and now both of them were all smiles.

But then when he turned to Marco, he saw that the boy was shaking all over.

“Is something wrong, Marco?”

The boy leaned forward in his seat, trying to make his limbs obey and his body relax, but he couldn’t.

“I’m not sure I understand, Carl,” he said after a moment. “Do you mean . . .” And then he began to cry.

Carl reached out and stroked the boy’s back.

“Rose and Assad, you tell him. He’ll believe it from you.”

“It’s all up to you, Marco,” Assad pronounced.

“Yeah,” Rose added. “But we don’t want to know where you are until you’ve found a proper place to live. We don’t want to hear that you’ve taken root in some Dumpster in some town in Jutland, you get it?”

And now they heard the boy laugh. Apparently he was beginning to believe in it himself.

“But listen, Marco,” Carl added. “Not a word about this to anyone, understand? Not even your kids or grandkids, OK? In return, we expect you to tell us everything you know about Zola and the clan in Kregme, and all the stunts you were pulling out on the streets. If you do that, our colleagues back in town will have something new and concrete to go on, and it’ll be a big win-win situation all round.”

Marco nodded and was silent for a moment. “What will happen with Miryam?” he asked.

“We’ll have to see. She’s probably not the one who will be the hardest for us to help. She’s been very cooperative.”

“OK, then I’ll be cooperative, too.” He sat still for a while and stared out over the city. “Is it really true, all this?” he asked eventually.

They nodded, all three.

“I just don’t get it,” Marco said, shaking his head. “But thank you so much.” Then came another slight pause. “Can we make a detour to Østerbro?” he said. “There’s something I need to do first.”

—

They pulled up in front of a doorway where a pair of teenagers stood making out. Marco asked Carl, Rose, and Assad to go in with him.

There was no answer when they rang the bell, so Carl pounded his fist against the door.

“Police!” he shouted, loud enough for everyone in the apartment building to hear.

It did the trick.

The two occupants seemed both frightened and reluctant when they saw four people standing at their front door, but at the sight of Marco their expression turned to intense anger.

“That one, we won’t let in. Or you either, for that matter. Where’s your ID, anyway?” one of them demanded, full of skepticism.

Carl pulled out his badge and stuck it in front of their faces. The two men exchanged glances, still shoulder to shoulder and unwilling to let them in.

Then Rose stepped forward. “We’d like a bit of consideration here, so if you gentlemen don’t mind, please step aside so as not to inadvertently prevent three officers of the law from carrying out their duty. The pair of you seem a bit slow-witted if you ask me, but I’m pretty sure you can understand that excessive denseness can easily be rewarded with correspondingly large doses of rage and nice, tight handcuffs.”

Carl was thunderstruck. It was almost like listening to himself.

The upshot was that the two men frowned simultaneously, then thought the better of it and stepped back to allow the frothing goth inside.

Then Marco beckoned them on to the little bedroom that could have fit into Assad’s cubbyhole at HQ three times over.

He opened a drawer and rummaged about until finding what he was looking for: an old-fashioned metal comb. He raised it in the air before getting down on his knees at the wall opposite the narrow bed.

Placing the comb in the groove between the floor and the baseboard, he ran it back and forth until he located the indentation where the comb found purchase.

Then, with a sharp tug accompanied by the protests of the two men, the baseboard gave way.

The relief that passed through Marco’s body was clearly visible to all.

He stuck his fingers into the hole and pulled out a clear plastic bag.

“Look,” he said, holding it up in front of them. “Now I have sixty-five thousand kroner to make a start. So you needn’t worry about me living in a Dumpster, Rose.”

Summer 2011

Carl looked at the
two notes on the desk in front of him. They’d been there for a month and a half now, staring at him every time he’d tried to tidy up. Wasn’t it about time he chucked them out?

He tipped back on the rear legs of his chair and tried to picture the two women in his mind’s eye. Strange, how quickly faces from the past were erased.

The past. Had it really come to that? Had his passivity in the wake of Lisbeth’s phone call and the wreckage of his relationship to Mona, with whom he’d been together for a number of years, now been consigned to the file marked
THE PAST?
He wasn’t sure he approved of the idea.

He picked up the two notes and for a moment considered crumpling them up and lobbing them into the waste-paper basket with a well-aimed overhand toss.

It was sure as hell no easy decision.

“It’s come, Carl,” said Rose, suddenly materializing in front of him.

“What’s come?” He looked at her without much enthusiasm. It had been a rough week in which nothing had gone right. And now something had arrived that most probably wasn’t good.

“The presumption-of-death verdict in the William Stark case. They’ve accepted the circumstantial evidence, so despite no body being found yet, they’ve decided to terminate Stark’s life on the basis of DNA samples.”

Carl nodded and put both slips of paper in his breast pocket. In a way, it was good news. At least the probate court could now begin to get the estate sorted.

This is great for Tilde and Malene, he thought, once he was alone again.

He took a look at TV2’s news channel where the reports on the tremendous monsoon-like downpour on this second day of July described a near-catastrophic scenario. Had it not been for the unfortunate fact that sewers everywhere were so hopelessly overburdened that at this moment shit was literally erupting from drains in hundreds of basements, including their own toilets at the end of the corridor, he would have been delighted by some of the consequences.

As if by an act of divine retribution, Pusher Street was completely flooded and laid to waste. The makeshift stalls were deserted, and not a single gram of hash was to be seen. Turnover must have dropped by millions of kroner in a matter of hours. Easy come, easy go. And the water had inundated Istedgade, too, closing down basement massage parlors and leaving the whores and pimps totally idle.

Sodom and Gomorrah had got what was coming to them.

“Jesus, what a stench down here,” Laursen said as he poked his head into Carl’s office. “How about coming upstairs and getting the smell of fresh-baked bread in your nostrils instead? Not everyone has left yet. Hell of a cozy place for a birthday party when all you’ve got is a one-and-a-half-room apartment.”

He chuckled and plonked his increasingly expansive backside onto the chair opposite Carl. “Anyway, listen. I haven’t had time to tell you this yet, what with that pork to roast and all,” he said. “Word came in today about that unidentified body from the fire up in Rungsted. You think you’re ready for this?”

“Go on.”

“They found out who made the dentures Assad fished out of the mouth of the corpse.”

“Yeah? Who was it, then?”

“One Torben Jørgensen, a dental technician up in north Zealand. They belonged to René E. Eriksen, just as you guys assumed.”

“Course they did,” Carl groused. “We said we recognized them, so they could have saved themselves the bother.”

“Yes, possibly. The only thing is, the DNA analysis of bone marrow from the corpse shows that the bloke wearing the dentures wasn’t of Caucasian descent. Turns out he was Negroid.”

Carl frowned.

“Assad and Rose! In here, please!” he hollered.

Both he and Laursen were a bit shaken at the sight of Rose as she appeared in the doorway with the pinkest hair this side of a luxury retirement home in Florida.

“Hey, Laursen, whassup?” said Assad, still with his trousers rolled up above his knees after a go on the prayer mat.

“The corpse with Eriksen’s teeth in its mouth was that of a black man,” Carl stated. “How about that!”

Assad’s eyebrows did a little somersault. “
What?
”

“The dentures
were
Eriksen’s,” Carl went on. “Forensics located the mold at a dental technician’s up in north Zealand.”

Assad flopped down on a chair.

“But this means Eriksen ran off and got away with everything,” he said dully.

Carl nodded. This conclusion had dawned on him, too. What a crock of shit.

“I reckon we can now assume we know who killed Brage-Schmidt and our unidentified black man,” he said. “And if he could do that, then most likely he’s also our perp in the murders of Teis Snap and his wife, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes,” Assad added. “Not to mention all the others.”

Rose bobbed up her new hairdo. As if they hadn’t already noticed it.

“Listen to you, talking out of a certain part of your posteriors. Can’t we agree that in reality we know fuck all? These are all just assumptions so that at least we can talk ourselves into believing we’ve got just a little bit of all this sorted. When it comes to assumptions, I couldn’t care less.”

Carl made a mental note to remind her of this last little statement when the time came. It would surely be only a question of days.

“One more thing,” said Laursen. “You probably already know, if you’ve checked your emails. They found Eriksen’s car. It’s standing, covered in dust, in a side street in Palermo.”

“
Palermo?
” Carl spluttered. “That’s effing Sicily!”

Laursen nodded.

“Yeah, looks like he just took off in his old car and managed to drive all the way through Europe without getting stopped.”

“Hurrah for the Schengen open-border agreement,” Rose grumbled.

“Yeah, it’s a bit of a trek,” said Carl. “But you’ve got to admit Palermo sounds like the perfect place for someone needing a new ID and maybe a new appearance.”

“Interpol is already on the case, so I’ve heard,” said Laursen.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Carl replied with a sigh. “And Interpol covers a hundred and ninety countries, so there just might be a chance he’s decided to go somewhere else, don’t you think?”

Assad shook his head. “You never know, Carl. It’s not for sure.”

“True, but as far as I can see we’re never going to find out where René E. Eriksen, or whatever he’s calling himself now, has gone into hiding. And with all that money he apparently took with him, I’d say we’re never going to find him. That’s been my experience in these kinds of situations. End of story.”

—

The windshield wipers were going flat out as Carl approached the motorway. He’d already seen several vehicles abandoned in the deluge.

Only a lunatic would want to chance a thirty-kilometer trip in weather like this. If only he had somewhere to crash until morning.

Then he remembered the notes in his pocket. If he turned left, it’d be to Lisbeth. If he took a right, he’d be headed for Mona.

He smiled fleetingly at the thought, then the smile was gone.

What the hell made him think that these two women, who more than likely already had a new rooster in the barnyard, would want anything to do with him?

And with that, he took the notes from his pocket, rolled down the side window and cast them to the wind. See if he cared!

After an hour and a quarter, a Venetian version of Rønneholtparken loomed in front of him.

Christ! he thought. There wouldn’t be many cars able to start in the morning without the help of a hair drier, his own included.

“Is the basement OK?” was the first thing he called out, as he stepped through the front door.

No answer. So most probably it was all a mess.

He glanced into the living room, finding the place unusually dark. Had they left Hardy alone with no lights on? What the hell were they playing at?

“Hardy?” he ventured quietly, so as not to give him a fright, and at the same moment all the lights went on.

“Ta-daaah!” howled Mika and Morten, and Carl nearly jumped out of his skin.

They stepped aside to reveal Hardy sitting upright in a colossal high-tech wheelchair equipped with all manner of joysticks and whatnots in front of his face.

“This is it, Hardy. Show Carl what you can do!” cried Morten.

—

Carl was still giddy with joy. The sight of Hardy propelling himself forward with a broad smile had reduced them all to tears.

The hugs and the heartfelt words of congratulation seemed like they would go on forever. As of today, a new era had announced its arrival at Carl’s house. Nothing less could describe it. Carl laid his head back on his pillow and tried to fall asleep, but couldn’t. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Hardy’s happy face and the empty bed in the living room. He sighed at the thought of all the things they could do together now, if only he could live up to it.

After another half hour spent musing about Hardy and the future, he reached out for the stack of junk mail he’d brought upstairs and tossed on to the duvet beside him.

A bit of consumer surfing and he’d be asleep in no time.

Much better than counting sheep, at any rate, he thought, sifting through the offers.

Then suddenly, in among the supermarket ads, there was a postcard.

Who in the world would ever send them a postcard? It had to be to Mika or Morten, surely. Maybe one of their friends who’d been at the party and just wanted to say thanks.

He looked at the name and saw it was his own. Only then did he notice that, besides the name and address, there was nothing written on the card. Instead, there was a little snippet of a text stuck on with glue:

The special exhibition of African jewelry was quite remarkable. The selection of handmade rings, bracelets and necklaces . . .

That was all. The rest was snipped off.

A wry smile appeared on Carl’s lips.

“Well, I’ll be . . . ,” he said to himself, conjuring up the image of a boy with nut-brown skin.

He turned the card over and stared at the motif for a long time.

Aalborg Tower—more than just a view
, read the caption.