The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “Do you know what, Carl? I don’t believe at all that story about Anweiler and her. And if it is true, why should Anweiler want to kill her then? What would be his motive? The report calls it a probable crime of passion. But on what do they base this? Cries had been heard coming from the boat, but nothing has been said about whose cries they were. I don’t think this tells us anything. Perhaps she was trying to sing along to Whitney Houston. Have you ever been to a market and heard the camels bellowing all at once, Carl?”

  Carl gave a sigh. What a fucking case. After all, he’d never asked for it. Not like this, anyway. What were they supposed to do now?

  Assad rested his stubbly chin in his palm. “When you look at the crimes Anweiler was doing a few years back, you can hardly call him stupid, can you, Carl? They were quite complicated ones, were they not?”

  “The last one was, at least. The online fraud. Still got done for it, didn’t he?”

  “Even so, Carl. This man is not without brains. But don’t you think it would be dumb of him to return to Copenhagen of his own accord only eighteen months after killing a person in that way? And then on top of that, give his address in Malmö to an acquaintance? No, Carl. As we say: a single camel at the trough cannot yield a calf.”

  Carl raised his eyebrows. His assistant was beginning to sound like his old self again. Thank Christ for that. Was there anything Assad couldn’t work his damned camels into?

  Assad studied him charitably. “I can see you are not quite with me, Carl. But this is what we say when something is missing from the whole.”

  Carl nodded. “OK, so what you’re saying for the moment is that Anweiler might be innocent. Is that it?”

  “Right, Carl. Unless another camel suddenly comes trudging along.”

  —

  Her face was as red as a lobster’s as she dashed along the basement corridor. Together with the black mascara, billowing black hair, and yellow scarf around her neck, she looked just like the German flag in a stiff breeze.

  “Looks like you’ve been doing some serious sunbathing, Rose,” said Carl, gesturing toward a chair next to Assad. It was a scorching that was going to hurt like hell in the morning. The sun in May could be deviously malicious when, like Rose, your skin was as white as chalk. He assumed she must have discovered that by now.

  “I know,” she replied, putting her hands to her blazing cheeks. “We couldn’t stay at Birthe Enevoldsen’s. That cleaning lady was impossible, wouldn’t leave us in peace. Used to sing opera, she says. You don’t hear a vibrato warble like that every day, I’m telling you.” She pulled a crumpled sheet of paper and a couple of postcards from her pocket and deposited them on Carl’s desk.

  “According to Birthe Enevoldsen, Anweiler sold his houseboat at the beginning of the month prior to the fire. He told Birthe he got a hundred and fifty grand for it with contents and all, but she didn’t know who bought it off him, or that the boat caught on fire and sank a few days later. My impression was that she wasn’t the type who bothers to keep up with the news or listens to gossip. Bit of a nerd, really. Know what I mean?”

  Assad nodded eagerly, always glad of a good cliché.

  “At any rate, she was dead certain Anweiler wasn’t in Denmark when the woman died in the fire. She reckoned he was at his mother’s in Kaliningrad. I can follow her on that. Have a look at this.”

  She shoved the first postcard across the desk. It looked like it had been made at home with an inkjet printer. The motif was utterly charmless.

  “That puts everything in a new light, wouldn’t you say, Carl?”

  The picture on the card showed a smiling Sverre Anweiler with his arms round a woman in uniform. The two of them were standing in front of stacks of shipping containers in some concrete dockland.

  A speech bubble had been drawn coming from Anweiler’s mouth. Best wishes from me and my mum!, it read in Swedish.

  “Apart from the gender, the son is the spittle image of the mother,” Assad commented with a snort.

  “The spitting image, Assad.”

  He was right, though. Ignoring Anweiler’s tattoo and his mother’s ample bosom, they were dead ringers: poor skin, pallid complexion, narrow lips, and drooping eyes. Two faces revealing that neither the inherited DNA nor life itself had been optimal.

  Carl turned the card over. It was postmarked Kaliningrad, the day before the houseboat burned out. “Can either of you read these squiggles?” he asked.

  “A very funny expression, Carl. ‘Squiggles,’ I understand this.” Assad nodded enthusiastically, practically straightening out his partially paralyzed face.

  Rose picked up the card again and began to read aloud: “‘The trip from Karlshamn to Klaipeda took fourteen hours. The onward journey by bus nearly the same due to three flat tires.’ It’s in Swedish, of course.”

  Carl’s eyes narrowed. Getting away from Copenhagen was certainly easy enough. The journey to Karlshamn required only a ticket available at any railway ticket office, no ID needed. In merely a few hours Anweiler could be at the ferry terminal, two hundred and fifty kilometers away in southern Sweden.

  He picked the card up off the desk again and studied it more closely.

  “OK, Rose. I’ll admit it looks convincing, but the card could have been made a long time before it was postmarked. I mean, it’s homemade, isn’t it? What would stop him from getting his mother to send it on at some agreed point in time? The postmark only indicates where it was sent from and when. It doesn’t tell us a thing about whether he actually dropped it in the mailbox himself.”

  Rose fidgeted with the end of her scarf. It seemed she wasn’t buying Carl’s take at all.

  “But since you’re giving it so much importance, I suppose we’d better take it seriously,” Carl went on. “Check the registration numbers of those Maersk containers stacked up behind Anweiler and his mother, OK, Rose? One verified piece of information to the effect that they were stacked there after the fire and we go to Marcus with this.” He nodded in acknowledgment: “Nice work, anyway, Rose. What else have you got for me?”

  She let go of the scarf. “Birthe Enevoldsen’s known Anweiler for years. She said he’d often gone on about visiting his mother in Kaliningrad, and afterward he was going to buy himself a motorbike and cross Russia from west to east following the Arctic Ocean, the Bering Strait, and the Pacific to Vladivostok, then back again from east to west through the border regions in the south. Maybe this card here suggests he actually did it.”

  Carl leaned across the desk. The next postcard was obviously a bought one. A little map of Russia on which a line had been traced with a blue felt-tip pen from Saint Petersburg through Arkhangelsk, Magadan, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, and Irkutsk, where a ring had been drawn around Lake Baikal. From there, the onward route was marked by a dotted line going through Novosibirsk, Volgograd, Novgorod, and Moscow.

  “On the back he writes that this was his route to Baikal, where he stayed the next four months. After that he ran out of money and worked for a while before heading on. The dotted line is the way he was planning on going.”

  Assad took the card and cast a glance at the postmark. “Look, Carl. The date is six months after the fire.”

  They sat for a moment as if trying to guess one another’s thoughts, before Assad spoke.

  “So Sverre Anweiler had a Russian mother and probably a Swedish father. And now I seem to remember that both Sweden and Russia allow dual citizenship. Am I right?”

  Carl wondered how the hell he was supposed to know when he was neither one nor the other. Too bad.

  “Then Anweiler could travel freely in both countries,” Rose interjected. “I don’t know the visa restrictions between Lithuania and this Russian enclave, Kaliningrad, but I’m sure he could have flown from Kaliningrad to Saint Petersburg without any bother.”

  “And the motorbike?”

  “I reckon he proba
bly bought some Russian job for a handful of coppers, don’t you?” She gave him a dozy look. Was he thick or what?

  Carl chose to ignore it and turned to Assad.

  “So Interpol’s warrant on Anweiler wasn’t put out until he’d already swanned off across the tundra, is that what you’re both thinking?”

  His two assistants shrugged. It was by no means unlikely, they all knew that.

  “What about after he got home, Rose?”

  “He sublet a apartment in Malmö and became a roadie for Daggers and Swords.”

  Carl frowned, but she was ahead of him.

  “A death metal band from Skåne, Carl. Anweiler’s just been in Copenhagen with them, they played a gig at Pumpehuset last week. That’s why he was here.”

  He nodded. “OK, it’s taking shape. In theory, then, he was in Russia from a few days before the fire broke out until just a short time ago. In the intervening period there’s been a warrant out on him from Interpol, but most likely he hasn’t been in contact with the Russian authorities, and Swedish-Danish border control on the bridge over the sound isn’t exactly likely to put anyone off. But if we’re right about this, then Anweiler never knew about the fire and just carried on with his life like nothing ever happened. The apartment in Malmö was only a sublet, so the police won’t necessarily have much to go on in respect of his movements.” Carl nodded to himself. It all sounded plausible, though he wasn’t convinced.

  “And this Birthe woman borrowed his pad in Malmö while he was over here, is that right?”

  “Yeah, the place is practically next door to the opera house, so it’s very convenient for her,” Rose replied.

  Assad stretched back in his chair. “A rather odd friendship, I would say then. How did Birthe Enevoldsen and Anweiler get to know each other in the first place, Rose?”

  “Through Louise Kristiansen. The woman on the CCTV footage who he met up with outside the Park Café. She was trained as a percussionist at the conservatory and played in a few bands Sverre Anweiler roadied for. She was playing in Copenhagen last week, too.”

  Carl looked at the time. He was meeting Mona in half an hour. At a posh café, for once. Not exactly her style, but for him the choice of venue was excellent, for otherwise he risked the bonus of having to deal with her unmanageable, eternally snot-nosed grandson.

  “OK,” he said in a suitably subdued tone of voice that signaled the meeting was over. “There is a lot that points in Anweiler’s favor, I can see that. And a lot that would have been nice to find in our colleagues’ reports. Things that might have shed a better light on his circumstances, such as his income source the last couple of years and his dual citizenship, not to mention the Kaliningrad connection. Whoever was responsible was most likely up to his ears in work while the investigation was in progress, so it’s hardly surprising if those ears turn red.”

  He smiled at the cleverness of his wit, but his assistants were nonplussed. Then he slapped his palms down on the desk. “Let’s adjourn, then, shall we? I’ve got things to do, so maybe you can check up on those containers in the meantime, Rose. And Assad, you can go upstairs to Department A and fill them in. I think we should spare Marcus, seeing as it’s his last few days. But tell Lars Bjørn there’s been a development in an old case that’ll probably give rise to some criticism being leveled. And then I don’t want to have any more to do with that case.”

  He was about to get to his feet when Rose held the crumpled notice up in front of him. The edges were frayed and there was a rip through the middle, but the message came across clearly enough:

  MISSING, it read.

  What the hell did he care, only a quarter of an hour from the day’s most interesting meeting?

  He clenched the silk pouch in his pocket and felt immediately buoyant as the song began to play in his mind.

  Hey-ay, Mona! Ooo-ooo, Mona . . . !

  10

  Marco was shaken up. He was just as unnerved as the people around him who pottered about in the sunshine on the walkways between the boats were relaxed.

  The clan had found him. His secure day-to-day life had been abruptly torn away from him. Moreover, he was now marked by a dead man’s stare.

  The dilemma he found himself in was crushing. What was he supposed to do now, when all his instincts were screaming at him to get out of the city for good if he valued his life, and at the same time he knew he could not?

  He had to protect his friends from Zola’s brutal methods, and he had to protect himself. But in which order was he to proceed?

  He looked out across the masts and tried to calm himself. The first thing he needed to do was to call Eivind and Kaj and warn them. Then he would have to pick up his things from the apartment. Without them he would be set back months, unable to pursue his goals.

  And he would also need to do the rounds and collect the money he was owed. Altogether, it was a fairly large sum.

  Marco buried his face in his hands. The case of the man with the red hair was sickening. He needed to go back and see if the notice was still there. All he could do was hope it was, for then he would take it with him and do some investigating. Perhaps then he would be able to understand why his father . . .

  He shook his head. If only Hector hadn’t got his jacket and his mobile, all these worries would be superfluous.

  Now, instead, he had to be more alert than ever: he needed the eyes of the deaf and the ears of the blind.

  —

  He stood at the pay phone at Svanemølle station, eyes closed, trying to remember the number of Kaj and Eivind’s dry cleaners. What were the last three digits? 386 or 368? Or maybe something else entirely? If only he had his mobile, a press of a button and he’d be connected. But now . . .

  At his fifth try, the ringing tone sounding in his ear, he felt reasonably sure. And then he got through to voice mail.

  “You’ve called Kajvind’s Cleaners,” came the sound of Eivind’s soft voice. “I’m afraid we’re not here at the moment. Our normal opening hours are . . .”

  Marco hung up. He was worried now. Why couldn’t they come to the phone? Had Zola’s people been round? He prayed they hadn’t. Maybe they’d just called it a day and gone home? No, that couldn’t be it, not this early. What, then? How was he to warn them when he was too scared to venture anywhere near where they lived, at least for the time being?

  And then he realized why the shop was closed. Today was Wednesday. For months, Kaj had complained about his bladder playing up, and he wasn’t the type who went to the doctor on his own. Eivind had promised to go with him to the hospital, Marco remembered now. The CLOSED sign was already in the window when he’d passed by the place a couple of hours before. How could he have forgotten?

  He turned away from the yachts down in the harbor, knowing this would be the last occasion in a very long time when the cries of the gulls and the salty breeze would be able to elicit happy thoughts about a future life.

  Some time later he approached Østerbrogade from Strandboulevarden. He gauged the distance to Gunnar Nu Hansens Plads, about six hundred meters, and noted nothing untoward on the pavements or the street. Still Marco preferred the cover of the trees and bushes, now in leaf. They would offer him protection against being spotted from a distance, so he chose the longer route by way of Jagtvej and Fælledparken.

  It took him twenty minutes, but he was leaving nothing to chance. All around him, people lay on the grass, relaxing in the sunshine, but who were they? Were Zola’s spies among them? Removing your shirt and pretending to be taking in the sun would be effective camouflage here. Hector would certainly think so, but then modesty had never characterized Zola’s world.

  Marco scanned the square minutely as he approached from the park. Again, there were too many people, too many dabs of color. Which one would leap out from the palette and accost him? Who among the café guests would suddenly turn in his direction, revealing an al
l too familiar face? It was impossible to keep an eye on them all. The café tables were all occupied, and everywhere young people sat cross-legged in clusters on the paving stones with bottles in hand, spirits high.

  As far as Marco could see, his ladder was still where he’d left it. And behind the statue, his bucket with all his gear.

  He found it odd that his things should have remained untouched. Had Zola instructed Hector to leave them where they were? Were they the bait?

  Marco put his hands behind his head and stretched his back. He realized the cramp in his stomach was the result of nervous tension. Trepidation was the worst thing he knew. Rather the disaster itself rearing up before him than the knowledge that it was about to happen.

  Would Hector leap forth the moment he stepped out into the open? Were there other clan members in the area? Should he cry for help if they caught him?

  Would anyone even react if he did?

  The doubt was real, for Danes preferred to stay in the shade when things heated up. He had seen it so often before. How many times had anyone tried to stop Marco or any of the other clan members in their crimes, even to the cries of Stop, thief? Formerly this passivity would make him feel secure. Now it served only to increase his feelings of unease.

  He proceeded cautiously, step by step, across the square toward the poster column. And when eventually he got there he realized the missing persons notice was gone and his scraper lay on the paving stones.

  Why was the notice gone? Had Hector seen him studying it?

  He nodded. Perhaps that was precisely why Hector had removed it, so he could take it back to Zola and they could try to figure out what it meant to them and why Marco was so interested in it.