Maybe it was better this way. The only things he had stolen in a long time were a few clothes and half a jar of pickled gherkins, and he wanted it to stay that way.
He walked round the house for five minutes in his bare feet just to savor the soft, ticklish feeling of plush carpets and imagine what it would be like to have a home of his own, surrounded by things he owned and was fond of.
When he came to the safe, the uneasiness rose up inside him again. He got down on his knees and peered inside to see if he could still remember the code.
He could. A4C4C6F67.
The enigma of it made him smile briefly, and then he suddenly realized the letters and the figures were not all written in the same way, but in different pairs of black and gray. The way the morning light slanted into the room made it obvious now. A4 was bold and black. C4 was lighter and rather more fuzzy, as though the pen had almost run out. Looking closer, he could see that C6 and F6 and 7 had apparently also been added at different times. So the code had gradually been extended. He sat down on the floor, leaning against the safe as he pondered the problem. Behind the sequence lay perhaps a series of separate actions rather than just one.
He let himself out through the back door, standing for a moment on the patio to take stock.
If there wasn’t a bike he could borrow in the shed, he would have to walk the whole way.
But there was.
–
His first stop was a library in Brønshøj, the closest to his route. He sat there reading for some time, close to the counter where he could keep an eye on who came in. Some went straight to the adults’ or children’s section, others first returning books they had borrowed. The latter were the ones he was waiting for because part of the process of returning books entailed scanning their national identity cards.
He picked out a boy his own age. Like most other young Danes, he lacked respect for the value of material things and was careless with his possessions. Marco watched as the boy slipped his ID back into his wallet, which he then casually stuffed into the open front pocket of his shoulder bag. Before long, the bag was lying on the floor at his feet while he surfed the Internet on one of the computers.
Marco approached slowly, and when the adjoining computer was vacated he sat down, silent as a cat, and typed in a Web address off the top of his head.
An hour later he parked the bike a couple of streets from his destination. Strictly speaking it was stolen, even though he was intending to return it.
Bellahøj police station on Borups Allé was rather bigger than he had anticipated, monumentally menacing and loathsome to the eye. Gray concrete surfaces, people endlessly coming and going. Marco couldn’t help feeling defenseless as he went inside.
Considering he had spent his entire life in the shadow of criminal activity, it felt more than a little strange that the first time he ever entered a police station, or even came in contact with the law, was something he was doing voluntarily. No one so much as looked at him as the automatic doors opened, and he walked in almost sideways in order not to expose his face to the cameras above the entrance. He gazed around the place in wonder. The duty desk was a study in streamline procedure and surprisingly devoid of drama. Neat sky-blue shirts and black ties all round, and most of the officers he saw were young.
Apart from Marco, only two women sat on the benches, waiting for their turn. As far as he could make out, one of them had had her bag snatched while the two were cycling together. Its contents had obviously been important to her, since she was sobbing and seemed to be in a state of shock.
It didn’t make Marco feel any better as he sat on the edge of the bench, trying to memorize what he was going to say when his turn came.
When eventually he was called forward, he placed Stark’s African necklace on the counter together with one of his missing persons notices.
The duty officer stared at them, slightly disoriented.
“The necklace belonged to the man in the picture,” Marco began, keeping an eye on the two officers who sat farther back behind the counter, typing away at their computers.
At this point he’d intended to say he had been given the necklace by a friend of his, and that this friend knew the man was dead and where he was buried. That this friend had told him who might have killed him and disposed of the body. And then he was going to say that his friend was too afraid to come in person, whereupon he would hand the officer the ID he had stolen from the boy at the library to “prove” that his friend existed. The boy would of course be unable to help the police if they contacted him, but at least they would have this to go on. And Marco they would never see again.
Only things turned out differently.
“Do you have any ID, son?” the officer asked.
It was a development Marco had not anticipated. Had he known, he would have stolen two cards, not one.
“You understand what I’m asking you for, don’t you?” the officer added.
Marco nodded and placed the ID on the counter.
The officer studied it for a moment.
“Thank you, Søren,” he said. “The way things work here, we’re going to have to speak to your parents because legally you’re what’s called a minor. So if you give me their mobile number, I’ll give them a quick call before we do anything else. Then they can be present while you tell us about it, all right?”
Marco’s brain went into overdrive. “I’m sorry,” he said, clutching at straws. “I can’t remember their phone numbers ’cause they’re always changing them. My mobile has their numbers, but it’s being repaired.”
The officer smiled. “That’s OK, Søren, I know what you mean. I’ll just look them up from your address here.” He indicated the ID card and rolled his chair over to a computer.
A second later he raised a finger in the air. He’d found them.
Marco backed away toward the entrance as the cop picked up the phone. It was all going wrong.
And as the duty officer waited for the reply, he looked up at Marco again and immediately sensed something was amiss.
“Hey, where you going, kid?” he asked, raising his voice.
At that moment Marco heard footsteps from the corridor behind the duty desk and a plainclothes policeman appeared, greeting a uniformed colleague and sending a shiver down Marco’s spine. It was the policeman he had seen through the window of Stark’s house only three days before, and this time their eyes met.
“All right, Carl, good to see you, too,” the officer said in return.
This was when Marco made a run for it, through the glass doors and away.
A cry went up behind him, commanding him to stop, and as he legged it past the parking lot two officers stopped in their tracks and stared open-mouthed. Before they had a chance to realize what was happening he was over the fence that ran alongside the building, tearing across a lawn and over another fence. A hundred meters farther on by the next road, Stark’s bike was parked outside a kindergarten, and seconds later he was pedaling hell for leather toward the city, choosing the narrowest, most inaccessible side streets he could find.
It had all gone wrong. He hadn’t been able to tell them where Stark’s body was buried or who had killed him. Almost even worse: he had been seen by the policeman who had spotted him outside Stark’s home.
Marco swore in as many languages as he knew.
Knowing the police as he did, they would not stop there. Before he realized it, they, too, would be after him. He only hoped that for all his caution he had not been caught on their CCTV.