“Have you had your hair cut?” he asked idiotically. He couldn’t see anything at all out of the ordinary.
A cry of hilarity went up from the kitchen. Morten never missed a thing.
“Mika!” shouted Morten. “Come upstairs a minute and give our detective here a clue, would you?”
Ten seconds later and Mika was up the stairs from the basement.
He was decently dressed this evening. There were days, even when the frost lay thick on the bike shed outside, when Morten’s muscle-bound physiotherapist had no qualms about going around in outfits more appropriate to a gay beach in San Francisco. Unlike Morten, he had the body for ridiculously tight trousers and T-shirts, but still. If any of Carl’s colleagues or his soon-to-be boss, Lars Bjørn, happened to stop by unannounced they’d never be able to look Carl in the eye again.
Mika nodded briefly to Carl. “OK, Hardy. Let’s show Carl how far we’ve gotten.”
He pushed Carl gently aside, then pressed a pair of fingers into Hardy’s shoulder muscle. “Concentrate now, Hardy. Concentrate on the pressure I’m exerting and focus. Come on!”
Hardy’s lips curled, his gaze seemed to turn inward, as though he were in pain. His nostrils flared. And thus he lay for a minute, perhaps two, before a smile appeared.
“It’s coming now,” he said, his voice stifled.
Carl’s eyes darted over the figure of his friend. What the hell was he supposed to be seeing?
“Blind as a bat,” said Morten.
“Who? Me?”
And then he realized what they were talking about.
It was as if a light breeze ruffled the cover of the bed, about halfway down. Carl looked back over his shoulder, but the patio door and the kitchen window were both shut, so it couldn’t be a draught. He reached out and pulled the cover aside and understood immediately what it was they were all so eager to show him.
Inevitably, his astonishment was accompanied by a mournful flight back in time to the moment when Anker was killed and Hardy was hit by the bullet that paralyzed him. The moment when he felt Hardy’s towering frame come tumbling down on top of him. Then to the days of Hardy begging to be liberated from the torment his life had become. And finally back to the present, where Hardy’s left thumb was moving, if only slightly. Four years of Carl’s despair and shame tossed away by the flutter of a couple of finger joints.
If he had not felt so oppressed and annoyed by the day’s events he could have burst into tears of joy. Instead, he merely sat there as though turned to stone, trying to comprehend the significance of these almost imperceptible body movements. They were like beeps from a display measuring a heart rate. Tiny movements that represented the difference between life and death.
“Look, Carl,” said Hardy softly, accompanying each movement with a sound.
“Dit, dit, dit, dah, dah, dah, dit, dit, dit,” he said.
Fucking hell, this was amazing. Carl pressed his lips tight. If he didn’t hold back he was going to start crying like mad. But he simply didn’t have the energy at the moment. He swallowed a couple of times until the lump in his throat receded.
The two men looked at each other for a while, both clearly emotional. Neither of them had ever believed things would progress this far.
Carl collected himself.
“Hardy, for Chrissake. You Morsed the SOS signal with your finger. You did, didn’t you? You Morsed, you big daft bugger!”
Hardy nodded, his chin colliding with his chest, exalted as a boy who had just overcome his reluctance and yanked out a loose baby tooth.
“It’s the only Morse code I know, Carl. If I could . . .” He pressed his lips together and stared up at the ceiling. This was a momentous occasion for him. “. . . I would have Morsed a great . . . hurrah!”
Carl reached out and ran his hand gently over his friend’s forehead. “This is the best news of the day. Of the year, for that matter,” he said. “You’ve got your thumb back, Hardy. Just what you wanted.”
Mika gave a grunt of satisfaction. “There’ll be more fingers yet, just you wait and see, Carl. Hardy’s so good to work with, there’s none better.”
With that he planted a kiss on Morten’s lips and disappeared off to the bathroom.
“What happened, actually?” Carl asked.
“I can feel things if I try hard enough.” Hardy closed his eyes. There was so much he had to think about now. “Mika has made me able to sense that my body isn’t completely dead, Carl. If I work at it hard enough, I might learn to use a computer again. Maybe move a joystick with my finger. Perhaps even operate an electric wheelchair without needing helpers around me.”
Carl smiled cautiously. It all sounded so promising and yet a little too improbable.
“What’s this on the floor?” came Morten’s inquisitive voice from the kitchen. “A silk pouch! Is this yours, Carl?”
He turned to his boyfriend, who was nonchalantly doing up his trousers. “Have you seen this, Mika? I do believe romance is in the air in our humble abode.” They gazed lovingly at each other and hugged with less inhibition than was warranted.
“Can we have a look?” they asked in unison, looking like they weren’t going to wait for an answer.
Carl got to his feet and prized the pouch carefully from his lodger’s peach-soft hand.
“You lot keep your mouths shut about this if Mona calls, yeah?” he said.
“Oooh, a surprise! A super-lovely romantic surprise! And you’re quite sure she hasn’t caught on?”
Morten had become ecstatic. Inside, he was most likely already thinking about the get-up he could wear that would best match the bride.
“Absolutely positively not.” Carl smiled. Their enthusiasm was catching.
“Hey-ay, Mona! Ooo-ooo, Mona! Tell you, Mona, what I wanna do . . . !” they inevitably began singing. In falsetto.
They didn’t need to be that enthusiastic.
Dinnertime was all about Hardy. Only a single sour note served to dampen the euphoria.
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Morten, his face a perspiring moon lit up by smiles, announced that from now on he and Mika would be pooling their resources. Morten’s Playmobil collection had been packed away for online auction and, as everyone could see, Mika had already moved in. Carl considered wearily that by rights such vital matters might be discussed beforehand, but what good would it do to mention it now? Aside from the fact that Jesper now preferred crashing at his girlfriend’s to sleeping at home, the domestic population had thereby gone up by twenty-five percent. And now Mika was sorting out his and Morten’s wardrobes in the basement, so their acute shortage of space could be ameliorated by donations to the town’s Red Cross shops.
No doubt he’d be keeping his pink sweater.
—
Rose was in a phase of hers that involved dressing from head to toe in black, albeit with the exception of an off-yellow scarf. For a time, the department would be treated to knee-length, black laced boots, tight cut-off pants, angular black eyebrows, and more metal stuck in her ears than there was in a medium-sized office stapler. It might have been all right for a punk gig back in the seventies, but it wasn’t exactly the most appropriate outfit when knocking on doors in a murder investigation.
Carl gave a sigh, staring at her ears and explosive hair. If nothing else, she was keeping the hair-gel manufacturers in business. “Haven’t you got a cap or something, Rose? We’re going out on a little job.”
She looked at him as if he’d just come home from Siberia.
“It’s the eleventh of May and sixty-eight degrees out there, so what would I want with a cap? Sounds like you need to adjust your inner thermostat, if you ask me.”
He sighed again. Clearly, there was nothing he could do. Staples in her ears or no.
On their way to the car, Gordon “just happened” to come charging over
from the direction of the duty desk with more than one indication that he had been sitting in the window on the third floor, keeping an eye out for a situation like this to arise.
“Well, I never! Are you on your way out, too? How riotous! Where are you off to?”
He failed to notice the venom in Rose’s eyes. It had been there since Carl told her what the day’s job involved. As if he didn’t know she preferred to choose her own assignments.
Rose’s gaze descended the length of Gordon’s spindly legs. “I’d say it was more relevant to ask you how far into town you’re thinking of going without any shoes on your feet. Dickhead!”
The man stared down self-consciously at a loose pair of size 13 socks that already appeared in dire need of a wash. Then, looking like a turkey trying to jab its head in all directions at once, he endeavored in vain to conceal his reaction. “Humiliation” was too tame a word for it.
“Oops. Must have had my thoughts elsewhere,” he proffered lamely.
Rose pinned him like an insect with her kohl-black eyes. “Moron,” was all she said. And it stung.
Though Carl could hardly refrain from passing comment on her less-than-desirable young suitor, he stuck professionally to the job at hand and filled her in on the details as they drove toward Østerbro.
“So this Sverre Anweiler’s never been arrested?” she asked, staring at the man’s photo in her hand.
“Yes, he most certainly has,” Carl replied. “He’s been done for loads of things before this, but only minor offenses. Passing off false checks, renting out apartments that didn’t belong to him. Deported from Denmark for five years at one point.”
“Charming bloke. How could anyone ever point a finger at such a nice guy, I wonder.”
“The victim who burned to death on the boat was a woman who had left her husband a note only hours before, telling him she’d found someone else. There’s a statement to that effect from a witness.”
Rose looked again at the photo of the man as Carl parked the car at the curbside.
“Was she right in the head? I mean, leaving her bloke for this? I can hardly imagine anyone less attractive.”
Carl was about to suggest Gordon but kept it to himself.
“Yeah, well. As things turned out it was a bit of an unfortunate swap she made,” he said.
“You said he’d been seen on CCTV. Anything else show up there?”
“There’s footage from three cameras, all covering the pavement outside storefronts on this side of the street, so the angle’s not that good on any of it. We’ll be lucky if we can see anything at all on the other side, I reckon. The first camera’s got a bit of the area outside the Park Café, though.”
He pointed across Østerbrogade in the direction of the combined café and nightclub.
“He was hanging around outside the supermarket over there, keeping an eye on women going into the café, it looks like.”
“And?”
“Well, then he disappears over to this side of the street. There’s a theory he popped over to the grill there for a bratwurst. Then, on the second tape he’s seen a few hours later outside the café with a woman on his arm, a woman quite a bit taller than him. I’ve printed a still photo, it’s in the folder there somewhere.”
Rose flicked through the papers and pulled out the cloudy image.
“It’s the same man, all right, I can see that, but the woman’s image is really blurred. How tall do you reckon she is?”
“According to Sverre Anweiler’s record he’s five foot nine in his shoes. I’d say she must be about six-two, wouldn’t you?”
Rose held the photo up close and squinted. “I can’t tell if she’s wearing high heels, so how tall could she be, actually? Have you seen the stilts women wear these days, Carl?”
He declined to comment. When the mood took her, there wasn’t a woman in a five-kilometer radius of police HQ who owned heels as high as Rose. Maybe it was why that flagpole Gordon had got himself worked up.
“The technicians had a good look at the tapes and she’s wearing flats. Dead certain, they were.”
“What about the third tape?”
“Yeah, well, that’s why we’re here now, Rose. As you can see from the time, it’s only a minute and a half later and the two of them are no longer in the area here.”
He pointed to the map.
“In that case they must have gone off through Brumleby.”
“Yeah, they’ll have cut through along there by that building where it says Rambow, but they can’t have gone all the way through the rows of houses because they never show up on the fourth tape that’s positioned on Øster Allé.”
Carl nodded to himself. Brumleby, the oasis of Østerbro. Originally built by the Danish Medical Association to house workers in the mid-nineteenth century. Now the tidy rows comprised two hundred and forty desirable dwellings. It would be a hell of a job and most likely impossible to go through them all. In any case, it had been the first time the police had gone knocking on doors there.
“And the investigators never found out who the woman was?”
“Apparently not. Maybe the technicians were wrong about her wearing flat shoes. Maybe she wasn’t nearly as tall as they thought.”
“Did they put the photo up around Brumleby? If she lived there it’d be bound to turn up a result. People round here must know one another, don’t you think?”
“The problem is, they couldn’t really do that because the surveillance wasn’t entirely kosher, if you know what I mean. The cameras were put up for the May Day celebrations in Fælledparken the previous Sunday, only they were slow to take them down again. That didn’t happen until Thursday. The investigators were told by Police Intelligence that the material could not be used in the way you’re suggesting. There are plenty of enterprising people in this city with the expertise and resources to make life hard for PI if their operational procedures become too widely known.”
Rose looked at him as if he’d gone off his rocker. “But we’re allowed to show the photo to people when we knock on their doors, aren’t we?”
Carl nodded. She was right. It was pure shit. Bureaucracy and the surveillance society at their worst.
—
One after another, they took the narrow streets between the yellow and white two-story houses that had been converted into apartments, down one street and up the next. It was a Wednesday morning of mind-numbing routine. If only everyone had been in so they could be crossed off the list, but many of them weren’t.
By the time they got to the hundred and tenth house, Carl was more than ready to step into the role of Rose’s boss and let her get on with it on her own.
“OK, this is going to be the last one,” he said, his eyes following a figure pottering about behind the panes of the front window. “You can do the apartment upstairs, then carry on with the next streets.”
“OK.” It was one of those two-syllable words that could be used in all sorts of contexts with a variety of meanings. In this instance it was intended to convey anything but appreciation, approval, or agreement. At best it was an invitation for him to provide an explanation, but Carl couldn’t be bothered to argue.
“Marcus Jacobsen’s packing in his job as chief of homicide on Friday. I need to get back,” he said abruptly. She could ponder on it, if the information even sank in. But then she hardly knew the man.
“Not exactly the coolest way of showing someone the ropes, if you ask me,” she muttered, then pressed the doorbell.
Carl listened. It sounded like the person he’d seen through the window was pacing up and down behind the door before eventually opening up.
“Yes?” inquired a heavily powdered version of his former mother-in-law. She was at least twenty years older than anyone else they had interviewed so far.
“Just a minute,” she added, removing a pair of rubber gloves of the
same sort Assad used when he cleaned their basement once in a blue moon.
“Just a minute,” she repeated, dipping a hand into the pocket of her apron and stepping out into the sunlight of the entrance. She produced a pack of smokes, lighting up and inhaling with such contentment that her shoulders quivered. Carl nearly salivated.
“Right,” she said. “I’m ready now. What do you want?”
Carl produced his ID.
“No need for that,” she said. “You can put that piece of plastic away. We all know who you are and what you’re going around asking about. Don’t you think people talk?”
Their jungle drums must have been in damn good working order. They hadn’t been here three hours yet.
“Are you trying to bother us, or help us?” she asked, a defiant look in her eye behind drooping eyelids.
Carl studied the list of Brumleby’s residents. “As far as I can see, no woman your age is registered at this address. There’s a Birthe Enevoldsen, aged forty-one, so who might you be then? Let’s get that cleared up first, shall we?”
“What do you mean, my age?” the woman snorted. “You think I’m old enough to be your mother, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Carl shook his head accommodatingly, but the truth was another story. Going by the layers of wrinkles, he’d have said she could have been his granny if anyone asked him straight-out.
“I do the housecleaning,” she said. “What does it look like I’m doing in there? Creating haute couture in a pair of rubber gloves?”
Carl smiled awkwardly. The sarcasm and use of French had disturbed his overall impression.
“We’re investigating a case of arson in which a person was killed,” Rose explained, making her first mistake. “In that connection we’re looking for this woman here,” she added, making her second. She held the photo up in front of the woman’s face.
With that, all their cards were already on the table. If this woman did know the woman they were looking for, she’d be keeping her mouth shut now.
“Oh, my goodness. Arson, you say? And a person killed? What would this lady here have to do with it?”
The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel Page 10
