The Marco Effect

7

Spring 2011

The shadows were long and heavy when Carl finally pulled into a space in Rønneholtparken’s parking lot. Normally the sight of the light from the exhaust hood over the steaming pots and casseroles would have given him a sense of comfort at having returned to the nest, but not today. Crap days at work always had their price.

He lifted a hand in acknowledgment as Morten, his lodger, waved to him at the window. But for once he wished the house had been empty, devoid of all life.

“Hey, Carl, welcome home. Fancy a glass of wine?” were the first words of greeting, as he dumped his jacket onto the nearest chair.

One glass? This was one of those evenings he could drink a whole bottle, no bother.

“Your dear ex-wife, Vigga, called,” was Morten’s second offering. Carl groaned. “She says you owe her mother a visit.”

Carl glanced at the bottle. Unfortunately it was already half empty.

Morten handed him a glass and was about to pour. “You’re looking a bit peaky, Carl. Didn’t the trip go well? Is it one of those nasty cases again?”

Carl shook his head, took hold of his lodger’s wrist, and carefully removed the bottle from his grasp. He’d pour the stuff himself.

“Oh, like that, is it?” Morten wasn’t always the brightest of souls when it came to gauging Carl’s moods, but today seemed to be an exception. He turned and went back to his cooking. “Dinner’s in ten minutes.”

“Where’s Jesper?” Carl asked, downing the first glass in one gulp with scant attention to bouquet, oak-wood aging, or vintage.

“You might well ask. God knows.” Morten spread his fingers in the air and shook his head. “He said he was off to do some homework,” he tittered.

Carl found this rather less funny, his stepson’s final exam being only a month away. If he didn’t pass it would be a new Danish record for uncompleted preparatory exams and what would a lad of twenty-one do then, the way the world was shaping up these days? No, there was damn little to laugh about.

“Aloha, Carl,” came a voice from the bed in the middle of the living room, indicating that Hardy was awake.

Carl switched off the perennial drivel emanating from the flat-screen TV and went over to sit at Hardy’s bedside.

It had been a few days since he’d studied his friend’s ashen face so closely. Was that a little sparkle in the paralyzed man’s eyes? Certainly there was something there he hadn’t noticed before. It almost reminded him of someone whose love life was suddenly looking up, or perhaps a promise that had just been fulfilled.

But besides that, Hardy was equipped with a built-in prism that served to filter the moods of his surroundings and that most probably had evolved through years of experience in the questioning of criminals. It was as if he possessed the particular ability to draw all the colors from a person’s aura that represented his state of mind and emotions. It was through this filter he now looked at Carl.

“What’s up, mate? Things not go well in Rotterdam?” he asked.

“Can’t say they did, no. I’m afraid we’re no closer to clearing up the case, Hardy. Their reports were like a bad movie script. No substance, poor groundwork, and very little reflection in any of it.”

Hardy nodded. It obviously wasn’t what he’d been hoping for, yet strangely enough he didn’t seem bothered. What’s more, he’d called him mate. When had he last done that?

“Anyway, I was going to ask you the same thing, Hardy. What’s up with you? Something’s happened, I can tell.”

Hardy smiled. “OK. Well, in that case maybe you can also make a swift assessment and tell me what you reckon, Mr. Detective, though it may not be that obvious at the moment. Let’s just call it a party game, shall we?”

Carl took a sip of his wine and scrutinized Hardy’s long frame. Six feet, nine and half inches of ill fate under a duvet cover as white as only a home-health-care nurse could procure. The shape of his immobile size 14¹/₂ feet and bony legs that had once been so muscular. A torso that in days gone by could press anyone resisting arrest into submission. Arms as thin as spaghetti that were once more than a match for the flailing haymakers of weekend drunks. Yes, this was but the shadow of a whole person lying before him. The lines of his face, etched by endless days and nights of grief and worry, were ample evidence.

“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?”

“I’m sorry,” Carl interrupted. “Obviously, the case isn’t quite as clear-cut as that. The woman we’re looking for isn’t under suspicion, we’d simply like to speak-”

“Do you mind not interrupting just because a lady’s doing the talking? You pipe down, mister, I prefer to deal with your punk rocker here. It might teach you not to be such a male chauvinist worm in the future,” the woman responded amid a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Carl avoided Rose’s gaze. If there was a grin on her face, the war between them that was always lurking latently would break out with an almighty explosion.

“Do you know her?” Rose went on impassively. People could call her a punk rocker or whatever they liked, she didn’t care. Carl wouldn’t have either, if he possessed her inclination to change identity.

“Know her? I wouldn’t go that far. But perhaps I do recognize her. As far as I recall, she’s in here on the desk.”

She didn’t ask them in, but there was little doubt she expected them to follow her, so they did.

“She’s over here,” she said, as they stepped into the living room.

She picked up a framed photograph showing a small group of women standing with their arms around one another and handed it to Rose. “Yes, I thought so; that’s her on the far right. Nothing wrong with my memory, if I say so myself. Probably one of Birthe’s friends from the conservatory.”

Carl and Rose bent forward at once, squinting their eyes at the photo. It certainly looked like it could be her.

“She doesn’t seem that tall in this photo,” Rose noted.

“Which one’s Birthe Enevoldsen, the woman you work for?” Carl asked.

She pointed to the girl in the middle. A smiling blonde-haired woman who also seemed to be in most of the other photos on the desk.

“I’m assuming Birthe actually lives here?” said Carl.

The cleaning woman glared at him, then turned to Rose.

“I started working for her just after she moved in, when Carlo was still alive. So it must be ten years ago now.”

“Carlo was her husband?” inquired Carl.

“Good God, no. Carlo was my dog. A Small Münsterländer, lovely brown color he had.”

Yeah, and the same to you, lady.

Carl frowned. “How tall is Birthe Enevoldsen, would you say?”

“Good God again. You’ll be wanting her shoe size next.”

“I’m sorry, please excuse my assistant,” Rose broke in. “But is she taller than me, for instance?”

The woman hesitated for a moment, cigarette in hand, giving Rose the once-over. Then she turned triumphantly to Carl, who just stood there, wide-eyed and speechless.

Had Rose just called him her assistant?

“I’d say Birthe’s about the same height as your boss here, Mr. Plod.”

Carl ignored the smirk on Rose’s face as they got back in the car. “Two things, Rose. One: never again refer to me as your assistant. I have a sense of humor, but it stops right about there, OK? And two: try running those half-baked thoughts of yours through a filter before you spout them out like that. You were lucky today, but if you’re just as careless another time, you’ll have people shutting up on you like clams.”

“Yeah, yeah, Carl, I’m with you. But let me ask you this: which of us has got a hundred percent success rate and which of us hasn’t? Besides, I’m quite partial to clams, so try again.”

Carl took a deep breath. “For the moment, things are going fine, and that’s good. We know the woman they were looking for last week isn’t as tall as six-two, more like five-nine, if we compare the height of those women in the photo. So there must be an error in Sverre Anweiler’s height as stated in the police report. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was standing on tiptoes the first time he got hauled in and measured. But if we look at the still we got off the CCTV footage and compare the girlfriend’s height with Anweiler’s, he comes out more like five-five than five-nine in his shoes. A fairly short guy, in other words.”

“Quite a guy all round, if you ask me.” Rose snapped the folder shut. “If what the cleaning lady says is right, Birthe lends her apartment out to friends and other people she knows whenever she’s away. If this girlfriend of hers needed a place to crash for only a couple of days, then it’s hardly surprising if no one in Brumleby noticed her.”

Carl started the car. “OK, so far so good. Now you can get out again, Rose, and stay here until Birthe Enevoldsen gets home. We don’t want her slipping away from us, now, do we? Chin up, and get yourself a bratwurst over on Sankt Jakobs Plads if you’re feeling peckish. I’ll entertain Gordon while you’re away.”

He watched her black-plastered face in the mirror as he pulled out of the parking space.

That mascara would come to a boil if she didn’t watch out.