“What about fingerprints?”
“There weren’t any.”
“Professional job, then?”
“So we reckon. Like I said, it’s all in the report,” Hansen replied drily. “The neighbor’s description of the perpetrators wasn’t worth much, I’m afraid. It was anything but precise. One of them was a bit darker than the other, she said, but not as dark as Africans or Pakistanis, and not like Turks or Arabs either. So basically, it could have been anyone.”
OK. That was what the neighbor had said to Hansen. The question now was whether Carl could get anything more precise out of the woman.
“And what exactly does this report of yours conclude regarding the nature of the break-in and its motivation? As far as I can see, it doesn’t say a thing.”
“I only write facts, Carl. We can’t all go around telling fairy tales like you.”
“Right now you’re not writing anything, you’re talking to me, so give it a try. What’s your conclusion, Hansen? I need the opinion of a burglary expert.”
Hansen sat up a bit straighter in his chair and stuffed his sky-blue shirt into his trousers. Clearly, he wasn’t a man used to dealing with compliments.
“Could just have been someone who read about the case in the papers and saw an easy job in an empty house. Pretty common these days. Funeral notices in newspapers are a case in point. Might as well just tell people there’s no one in. Then you’ve got all the morons who post their vacation plans on Facebook and other places. When the cat’s away the mice will play, as the saying goes.”
“Any other ideas?”
“The alternative is someone looking for something in particular. To be honest, I think that’s your best bet.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because the thieves concentrated only on certain places in the house even though they were there more than an hour. It was as if they’d been there before.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because otherwise, dear Carl, everything in the drawers would have been scattered all over the place. Instead, they immediately started slashing mattresses and sofa cushions and pulling the furniture out from the walls to see if there was anything behind. Makes one think they were already familiar with the place, as though for example they’d been there before.”
This was just what Carl wanted to hear. He thanked Hansen and headed for the duty desk. Next stop would be Stark’s neighbor. He wanted a description of the thieves from the horse’s mouth.
But then something happened instead.
The moment he stepped into the desk area, exchanging brief hellos with a former colleague, he saw a boy standing by the entrance.
Carl realized it wasn’t the first time he’d looked into those eyes.
What the… was all he managed to think before the lad made a break for it, through the entrance doors and away, the duty officer calling out after him.
Carl began running, too, and just managed to see him disappear over the perimeter fence and head off toward Hulgårdsvej.
His cries to stop were in vain.
“Who was he?” he asked the duty officer.
The policeman gave a shrug and handed him an ID card.
“Søren Smith.” Carl tilted his head. “Hmm, he didn’t look much like a Søren to me.”
“No, he didn’t. Trace of an accent, too, I’d say. He could have been a late adoption, of course. I’m about to give his folks a call. Maybe they know what was bothering him. Oh, and he just managed to dump these things on the counter. Not sure they’re his, though. Might belong to someone who did something he wanted to report to the police.”
He pointed toward a necklace and a poster of some kind.
Carl felt his jaw drop.
“Well, fuck me,” he almost whispered.
He put a hand on the duty officer’s shoulder. “No need to make that call. I’ll get over to the family straightaway. And I’ll take these with me, OK?”
–
The house was unusually neat compared to most others in Copenhagen’s Nordvest district. Who would have thought that behind the rose hedge in this industrial-looking area with its urban planner’s nightmare of heterogeneous blocks of apartments and anarchistic lattice of plots of land would be found such an idyllic little thatched cottage?
The woman who opened the door, however, looked rather less idyllic and was certainly not used to strangers ringing her doorbell.
“Yes?” she inquired hesitantly, eyes scanning Carl as if he were carrying bubonic plague.
He pulled his badge out of his back pocket. As could be expected, the effect it had wasn’t comforting.
“It’s about Søren. Is he in?” he asked, knowing full well he probably wasn’t, seeing as he’d only just left the police station.
“He is, yes,” the woman replied anxiously. “What’s this about?”
Jesus! The lad must have had a bike parked nearby, otherwise there was no way he could have gotten home so fast. “It’s nothing serious. I’d just like to have a word with him, if you don’t mind.”
She ushered him inside into the front room, wringing her hands and calling for the boy a couple of times before eventually darting up to his room and dragging him away from his computer and downstairs again under vociferous protest. Separating a teenager from his favorite toy wasn’t easy, Carl knew the problem all too well from back home.
A run-of-the-mill Danish youngster with hair the color of liver paste wriggled free of her grip. It was not the boy he was looking for, not by a long shot.
“I think you lost something,” Carl said, handing him his national identity card.
The boy took it reluctantly. “Yeah, I did. Where’d you find it?”
“I’d rather ask you why you don’t have it yourself. Did you lend it to someone?”
He shook his head.
“And you’re sure about that? There was a lad at Bellahøj police station half an hour ago using it for ID, saying he wanted to report something on behalf of a friend. That wouldn’t be you by any chance?”
“No way. The card was in my wallet that got nicked out of my bag at the library in Brønshøj. And I’m pretty sure who took it. Have you got my wallet as well? There was twenty-five kroner in it.”
“I’m afraid not. What were you doing there, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be in school at that time of day?”
The boy looked affronted. “We’re doing a project, if you know what that is.”
Carl looked at his mother, whose shoulders had gradually relaxed. He wondered if she took an interest in his school project.
“What did this thief look like, Søren? Can you describe him to me?”
“He had on a checkered shirt and didn’t look Danish. Not black, more brownish, like he came from southern Europe. I’ve been to Portugal and he looked like a lot of the people there.”
Carl was certain. It was the same boy he’d seen at the police station and outside Stark’s house a couple of days before. So far, so good.
“How old do you reckon he was?”
“I dunno. I didn’t really look at him. He was just sitting at the computer next to me. Fourteen or fifteen, maybe.”
–
It wasn’t the first time Carl had been inside the building that housed the public library on Brønshøj Square. He recalled the time his patrol car was sent out there to detain a drunk who had been playing Frisbee with the library’s LP collection. And though it had been some years ago and the building had since been freshened up a bit, it still looked like the old Bella cinema that, like so many others around Copenhagen, had given up the ghost and been superseded by supermarkets and, in this case, a bank and local library.
“I think you’ll need to ask Lisbeth. She stands in for our section leader sometimes,” said the librarian at the counter. “She was on duty at the time you mention.”
Ten minutes passed before she arrived, but it was worth the wait.