“Was it open before the break-in, too?” she asked Assad.
He nodded. “Malene Kristoffersen said it was never locked. William Stark never used it. He had a safe-deposit box with Danske Bank, but it was canceled a few months before he disappeared.”
“Did she have any idea what that deposit box might have contained?” Carl took over. “There must have been something of value in it, or there’d be no point in having it, would there?”
“Malene said he had some floppy disks and CD-ROMs, and his parents’ wedding rings. But he took all of it home, went through the disks on his computer and wiped the disks clean.”
“Do we know what was on them?”
“His doctoral thesis,” Assad replied.
“Doctoral thesis? Are you saying he has a PhD?”
“He never got that far. He hadn’t even tried to get it approved.”
“Sounds daft, if you ask me. Why would he delete all his work?”
“The same reason you didn’t want to be a chief inspector, I suppose.”
Carl stared at Assad. What the hell was he on about?
“And why didn’t I want to do that, Assad?”
“Because then you would have had to do a different job, Carl.” He smiled. “You don’t want to end up a commissioner in northern Jutland, do you?”
Assad was right. God forbid that ever happening.
“So you reckon he was afraid of being booted upstairs if he got his PhD. Did Malene Kristoffersen tell you that?”
“She said he was happy where he was and that he was not the kind to bloast.”
“I think you mean boast, Assad. But then why the hell did he go to all the bother of writing that thesis?”
“Malene Kristoffersen said his mother wanted him to, because his father had a PhD. But when she died, he changed his mind.”
Carl nodded. His picture of William Stark was slowly taking shape. He found himself liking the man more and more.
“And do we know what this thesis was about?”
Assad flicked through the pages. Malene Kristoffersen couldn’t remember exactly, but something about setting up foundations in international contexts.”
“Sounds like a barrel of laughs.”
He got down on his haunches and peered into the safe. Like they said, it was empty.
Then they went downstairs into the basement, finding nothing of immediate interest.
As they were getting ready to leave, Carl scanned the ceilings and walls for anything irregular, but everything seemed nice and orderly. Almost too nice for his taste.
“Anything in the loft?” he asked, as Rose’s backside appeared in the hatch at the top of the ladder.
She brushed her hands across her face, then shook her head. “Nothing but a load of cobwebs. I hate cobwebs.”
Carl nodded. Getting to the substance of a case was never easy such a long time after the event. Maybe Malene Kristoffersen had been too thorough with her cleaning. Maybe something important had gone into the trash, or into the pockets of a pair of thieves. There may once have been traces of evidence that time had now erased.
“OK, I’d say we are done here. Not that it’s told us much. But let’s go next door and ask about these jokers who did the break-in. She’s out in the front garden now, I see.”
He looked out at the woman on her knees with her box of plants at her side, and as he did so he noticed the boy standing on the opposite pavement looking up toward the window. It wasn’t so much the appearance of him that made Carl frown, though he seemed both sad and neglected. Rather, it was the way he looked at him in the split second their eyes met. Like a defendant meeting the judge. The kind of look that sometimes appeared in a person’s eyes when they realized they had just encountered an enemy.
The boy quickly looked down and turned his head away, making off faster than Carl could manage to step closer to the window.
Clearly, he didn’t want to be discovered. It was all very strange.
“Did you see that lad there?” Carl asked. Both Assad and Rose shook their heads.
“Whoever he was, he didn’t look pleased to see us here, that’s for sure.”
15
Marco waited an hour before cautiously sneaking back to find both the woman in the garden and the police car gone.
He walked calmly up the drive, his eyes fixed on the front door. As far as he could see, there was no sticker saying the place had an alarm, so he carried on round to the back of the house, where he discovered a basement window without hasps, thirty centimeters high at most, the frame screwed tight to the jamb from inside.
Marco smiled now. He was on familiar ground. He placed his elbow against the center of the pane, applying pressure to the glass, then striking his clenched fist sharply with his free hand, turning the bone of his elbow into a chisel. The sound as the pane splintered into a star was almost imperceptible, and Marco began to pick away the shards one by one, leaning them neatly up against the wall.
The opening of the window was a black hole into the dark basement. He lay down on his back, arms tight against his sides, then wriggled forward, legs first. Even a much smaller window would have provided space enough for a guy like him.
The basement was no more than a single room, about two-thirds the width of the house. Lime-washed walls and a fusty smell of damp and washing powder. A combined laundry, workshop, and storeroom for pickled cucumbers, obviously unused for some time. There was a carton of Tide on top of the washing machine. Marco upturned it, noting with satisfaction that the contents had long since congealed. He was certain now. No one came down here anymore.
His eyes passed quickly over tins of old paint and neglected tools as he stepped toward the door into the passage, unlocking it and opening it wide, his first emergency exit now secured.
Then he went up the stairs to the ground floor, found the patio door and opened it, too. Second exit secured. He paused and scanned the room for sensors, listening for the faintest hum, anything that might reveal the presence of a more sophisticated alarm system, a hook-up to a mobile phone or a neighbor’s landline.
Finding nothing, he set to work systematically. His eyes ate their way through room after room. During a normal burglary they would have routinely skipped anything that might make him think of those who lived there. Sympathy for the people from whom he stole was the worst of all evils, Zola always said. “Pretend all the possessions belong to you, and the people you see in the picture frames there are insignificant strangers. The toys you see belong to your own small brothers and sisters and have nothing to do with the children of the house. Remember this.”
The last part was especially hard to think about.
But Marco was a thief no longer. He wasn’t here to steal these people’s possessions but to take in their history, the tiny indications of who they might be and why.
So he started with the drawers and their contents of personal papers.
It was clear William Stark was a man who set store by order. Marco determined this immediately as he pored through cabinets and cupboards in the living room and dining room. Most people’s drawers were a mess: a Ronson lighter from days gone by, discarded mobiles, toothpicks in plastic containers, half-empty packets of tissues. Tablecloths here, birthday decorations there. Marco had rifled through the like at least a hundred times, but here it was different. William Stark didn’t keep such things. Even the walls and the shelves were devoid of anything reminiscent of times past. No photo of the young William standing between proud parents at his confirmation, a grinning face beneath a graduation cap; no Christmas cards saved in a box. Nothing in the way of nostalgia. Instead, Marco found handwritten tax reports and insurance documents in separate folders, a bowl of foreign coins in small plastic bags, receipts, boarding passes in bundles, travel brochures, and handwritten descriptions of hotels at various destinations, arranged in alphabetical order and held together by rotting elastic bands.