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.