“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.”