The Marco Effect

9

Spring 2011

“All right, Rose, have you found our perp? What did Birthe from Brumleby have to say for herself?”

Carl pictured his funereally clad and almost certainly thoroughly pissed-off assistant as he held the mobile to his ear and Assad’s face popped up in the doorway. He waved him in with a wry smile and turned on the mobile’s speaker. No doubt Rose had waited in vain for the woman most of the afternoon, and he didn’t want Assad to miss out on the tantrum he felt sure was coming. It ought to cheer him up a bit. Rose at full throttle was always the high point of the day. Carl chuckled to himself. He wouldn’t be surprised if the cleaning woman with the bad attitude had given them the runaround and her employer had never showed.

Oddly enough, Rose was as dry as a slice of toast. “Sverre Anweiler was staying in the apartment for a couple of days last week,” she began, much to Carl’s surprise. “He’d lost his own key to the place, but the woman he was with on the CCTV footage, a Louise Kristiansen, was staying in the apartment at the same time and she had one. So Anweiler arranged for them to meet up so they could go back together. Anything else you’d like to know, my little assistant?”

Carl’s smile wilted a little as he did his best to ignore Assad’s mirth. “OK, Rose, I’d say that joke’s wearing a bit thin now, wouldn’t you? Anyway, interesting information, but run it by me one more time, eh? Are you telling me this girl, Birthe, had invited the wanker to stay in her place?”

“Yeah, and this girl, Birthe, as you call her, is sitting right here next to me, so you can speak to her yourself if you like.”

Good Lord, how indiscreet of him, but judging by the knowing grin now spreading across Assad’s face, he found it funny, at least.

“I’m sure you can manage on your own, but thanks anyway. How come Anweiler was staying with her? Were all three of them there at once, or what?”

“No, Birthe’s playing flute in the Malmö Symphony Orchestra at the moment, so they just swapped apartments for a couple of days while she’s over for rehearsals. It’s a very demanding concert, apparently.”

“Whoooaa, just hold on a minute, will you, Rose? This is going too fast for me. Have you told Birthe there’s a warrant out on Anweiler?”

“Yeah, and she didn’t know. Neither does Anweiler, she says.”

“She must be damn naive if she believes that.”

“Do you want me to tell her? Like I said, she’s sitting-”

“No, thanks, I’d rather you didn’t. Just tell her we’d very much like to get in contact with the man.”

“I’ve got his phone number.”

Jesus! This was almost too much.

“Full report as soon as you get back, OK? And we’ll keep an eye on this Birthe. She’ll have to inform us of her whereabouts the next few days.”

“I’ve already told her.”

Assad emitted a suppressed grunt. It wasn’t helping Carl’s mood.

“One more thing, Carl,” Rose continued. “We’re sitting here at a table outside the Park Café, and next to us there’s this ladder leaned up against a poster column. It looks kind of strange. Like whoever was up it suddenly did a bunk. Left his scraper stuck there and everything.”

“No, you don’t say. Man leaves job. Do you want me to phone it in to the Work Authority?”

Carl let out a sigh. What the hell was she doing, sitting at a café instead of back at Birthe Enevoldsen’s apartment? If she thought he was going to get her latte refunded, she had another thing coming.

“Just listen, Carl. I’m about to get to the point. Just where his scraper’s stuck in the layers of posters there’s a notice about a missing person, a man. I’m pretty sure it’s one of our cases, so I’ve taken it down to bring back with me. Just so you’re warned.”

Christ! No sooner had he let Rose loose than she was digging up more work for Department Q. If she reckoned every missing persons case in Denmark was best off on his desk, he might just as well book his bypass operation now.

He concluded the conversation, expecting to see a glimmer of irony in Assad’s crumpled face, but the man’s thoughts seemed to be buried in the folder he’d placed on the other side of the desk.

“I’ve been reading the Anweiler report, Carl,” he said. “There are many things I do not really understand, especially now that Rose tells us this about the man.”

What the hell? Had Assad started on a new case off his own bat? Was he picking up Rose’s bad habits? What a fucking pair they were! Under normal circumstances Carl would have sent up a couple of blimps to ward them off, but right now he could hardly conceal his delight. Not in regards to the Anweiler case, which as far as he was concerned they could chuck into the Mariana Trench, but because Assad appeared to have mobilized an interest in something. What a welcome miracle.

Since yesterday’s blunder about his relationship with Lars Bjørn, it was as if Assad had suddenly woken up, and Carl, for one, definitely didn’t want him spacing out again.

“What exactly don’t you understand, Assad?”

“The houseboat had no motor.”

“No engine. Really? And so what?”

“It was quite a big boat, Carl, with lots of rooms and everything, almost like a little house. A living room with furniture, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. Cheap rugs and bookcases. Reproductions on the walls.”

Carl shook his head. This was brilliant. If Assad kept going on like this he’d probably end up confiding that he used to be an interior designer.

“There was even a stereo they found among the wreckage.”

Oh, boy, more details. Next thing, Assad would be telling him what sort of music they left in the CD player.

“And there was a Whitney Houston CD in the CD player.”

There it was. Of course. Carl nodded and gave him a look that said, Get to the point, Assad.

“There are so many things that do not fit in with this fire on the houseboat, Carl. Especially the insurance.”

Carl frowned. He knew what it meant when Assad’s round eyes suddenly transformed into fathomless pools. It looked like this was going to take more time than he’d bargained for.

“The policy had been canceled. Yeah, I know that. And you think that’s odd?”

“Yes, because only a week before, the boat was fully covered. Home contents, third-party liability, hull coverage, everything. Sverre Anweiler must have liked that boat and all the things inside it very much, don’t you think, Carl?”

“Yes, maybe. Insurance fraud was my first thought, too, until I started reading up. If you read closely, the police report faults him exactly on that count, Assad, for the insurance having been canceled. The theory is that the woman’s death was planned and the lack of any insurance payout would make sure no one suspected him of anything. The policy would have given him a hundred and fifty thousand for the boat and a hundred thousand for the contents if it hadn’t been canceled. Not exactly a fortune, but a tidy little sum. Since Anweiler’s got a record for fraud, linking the death with another insurance fiddle would have been the first thing to spring to mind if the barge had been insured. Some reckon he might have canceled the policy to give himself an alibi, and that the woman was killed for reasons other than economic.”

Assad nodded. “Yes, I know this, Carl. But what is then the motive behind the killing? And the music in the CD player, what about that? I don’t think a man like this Anweiler would listen to Whitney Houston, so most likely he did not put it there himself.”

“Maybe. But what are you getting at? And what on earth makes you think a man like him wouldn’t listen to Whitney Houston? Because he looks like a skinhead? You don’t have to have hair to listen to pop, surely?”

Assad gave a shrug. “Have a look at this police photo.”

He pulled it out of the folder and handed it over the desk to Carl. Anweiler was definitely an unappealing, anemic sort by the looks of him. Indeed, it was hard to imagine why anyone would want to have anything to do with this withered creature.

Assad jabbed a finger at the man’s open-necked shirt. “There’s a tattoo visible here. You can read about it in the reports on the other cases Anweiler was involved in. He had it done during his first stretch in prison.”

“I’m guessing it doesn’t read ‘Whitney Houston.’”

“No, it reads ‘Aria’ in Russian letters. Look: A, and then a P that is an R, an upside-down N that is an I, and a back-to-front R, which in this case is an A.”

“OK, easy as pie, I can see. I didn’t know you knew Cyrillic script. ‘Aria,’ you say. Opera buff, is he?”

Assad’s lip twitched. “Ha, ha, not exactly. One can hear you’re a little stuck in the mud, Carl. Aria is a heavy metal band from Russia. Quite well-known.”

A heavy metal band! Jesper had most probably given him a barrage of their decibels at some point.

Carl nodded. He could see that Assad’s reasoning made some kind of sense. A devoted heavy metal freak was hardly likely to go soppy over Whitney Houston’s cuddly vibrato.

“OK, so you think it was the victim, Minna Virklund, who put the CD in the player. But so what? There must have been loads of time between her arriving and the explosion that killed her. Why shouldn’t she have put some music on? You probably reckon that if she’d just done a bunk from her husband, Whitney Houston probably wasn’t the first thing she made sure to bring with her. Is that it?”

“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 probably 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…!