Stark was a diligent man and had copied all his work-related mail from the ministry’s server onto this laptop. Presumably so as to be able to delve into his ministerial tasks at home, as seemed to be evident from the times at which he had sent e-mails out, often past midnight or very early in the morning. The man obviously didn’t need much sleep.
René stretched his muscles. His own fatigue was getting the better of him, but he needed to stay awake. He didn’t have much time. In three hours he had to be in his office at the ministry, and later in the day he would have to decide whether he needed to phone Curaçao. He hoped it wouldn’t be necessary because he didn’t want the war against Snap and his associates to commence before he himself elected to initiate it.
He scribbled some more notes down on his pad, prompted by his scrutiny of Stark’s files and documents. There was a snippet about Stark’s mother, scraps concerning his stepdaughter’s hospital treatments and some chess tournaments Stark had taken part in years before.
After that he felt like he’d pretty much been through everything. But who was to say whether the answer lay here? Some people made up passwords on the basis of previous exploits, like a mountain they had climbed. Others used incidents that had left a lasting mark on their life. In the movie Citizen Kane, the newspaper magnate’s dying word was “Rosebud,” and the whole film revolved around the mystery of who bore the name and whether it would reside in Kane’s thoughts until the very last. René shook his head as he pictured the deceased magnate’s belongings going up in smoke with no one noticing that among them was a sled embellished with the name Rosebud, surely a relic of Kane’s happiest moments in childhood. Thus the answer to the mystery remained forever undiscovered.
But what about Stark? How many incidents, brief impressions, people, animals, and things might have made a lasting impression on the man? The possibilities were boundless.
He stared at the empty field as though hypnotized, as if it might reveal the password of its own accord.
Come on, come on, he urged himself. If he didn’t work it out now, he would have to give up. He certainly wasn’t going to involve anyone else in figuring out the log-in details of a computer that in theory did not even exist.
But what might he find in that virtual landscape if he did get inside? Would there be anything he needed to know? Had Stark stored incriminating information, or was René merely going to find pictures of naked women and e-mails that concerned no one but Stark himself?
He stretched the muscles of his neck to loosen them and took another crack. First he typed in the name of Stark’s mother, then her civil registration number, then her initials and her civil registration number, followed by her name spelled backward and in all sorts of combinations. Eventually, he crossed her off his list.
After that, he tried the names of various grandmasters of chess: Ruy Lopez, Emanuel Lasker, Bobby Fischer, Efim Bogoljubov, Bent Larsen, Anatoly Karpov and all kinds of other hits he found on the net relating to the game. Tournaments, concepts, and terminology in both Danish and English, the names of the pieces, one by one, followed by different combinations of famous moves.
No solution. A needle in a haystack.
Again, he shook his head, looked at the time, listened to hear if his wife was getting out of bed. Then he cocked his head to check the weather outside, before returning to the empty log-in field.
What could have meant something to William Stark besides his work? As far as he was aware there was nothing but chess, his lady friend, and her daughter. But they were parameters he’d already been through from every angle.
But what about the less obvious?
Nicknames? Special dates? Their first encounter? Their first kiss? What could have meant something to him?
He looked at Malene and Tilde Kristoffersen’s names, trying for the umpteenth time to rearrange them, but there were far too many possibilities.
What had been most important to them? The most important of all? Most likely the daughter’s illness and their efforts to make her better. Yes, it could well be that. Nothing had occupied Stark’s mind up to the time of his disappearance like Tilde’s health. René knew as much from the few occasions on which he had listened with rather reserved admiration to Stark’s description of how much they strove to help the poor girl.
He looked again at his notes, nodded to himself and typed “Crohn’s disease,” expecting yet another rejection.
And then it happened. He was in, and like the phoenix from the ashes a virtual desktop appeared with a background photo of Tilde, taken in a carefree moment. No intricate combinations, no hyphens, no numerals, nothing. Just “Crohn’s disease”—and voilà, he’d entered the promised land.
As his eyes widened, he heard the slap of bedroom slippers on the tiles of the bathroom floor, the door closing hard as though his wife had got out of bed on the wrong side again. He had ten, maybe fifteen minutes until he had to close the laptop and pretend he’d just gotten up himself. Otherwise, Her Majesty’s prying questions would know no bounds and his fatigue would be compounded beyond endurance.
He skated across the folders on the desktop. They were neatly ordered, labeled according to the period in which the files they contained had been created, from 2003 to 2008. He clicked on a couple, finding their contents rather uninteresting at first blush, mainly large numbers of scientific studies, correspondence with doctors and the families of patients all over the world, Tilde’s test results, copies of medical records, letters of protest, and respectful acknowledgments. All with the sole aim of getting to grips with Tilde’s illness and trying to do something about it. Nothing new or surprising as far as René could make out.
He proceeded into the Documents library to see if there could be folders containing information that might compromise the group or reveal whether Stark had been cognizant of the Baka project fraud. For while Stark’s disappearance had given rise to general consternation, René himself was more interested in finding out why Stark hadn’t already gone missing in Cameroon as planned. Why had he come back early? Something must have happened in Cameroon, and knowing Stark as he did, René could only presume that some kind of prior knowledge had prompted him to react so unexpectedly.
But this was still mere conjecture.
Upon hearing his wife open the bathroom door rather less demonstratively than she had closed it and that the sound of slippers had now been superseded by the padding of bare feet, he knew it was time to stop.
He clicked on a couple of icons and took a quick look at the rest of the folders under Documents. And so it was his eyes came to rest on one without a name.
Five minutes, surely he could allow himself five minutes. So he clicked on the folder, whereupon at least twenty subfolders appeared, each specifying a geographical location and particular subject.
Some bore the names of African states, like Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya, or Ghana. Others were more cryptically labeled: CNTCTNME, BESTKS., CNTRCT, POL1, POL2, POL3, and so on.
René found it odd. His ministry no longer provided aid to several of the countries in question, and some of them belonged to a category of states with whom they’d had considerable problems in recent years when it came to getting them to report back properly.
He clicked on a random folder. CNTCTNME, it read, clearly a file containing the names of Stark’s most important contacts. He quickly ran through the list. Many of them had been crossed out in red and replaced by others a fair amount of time before Stark’s disappearance, but René recognized them all.
He shook his head and opened the next folder: CNTRCT. In many ways this one seemed more complex.
René frowned as his wife slammed the doors of her wardrobe upstairs. So this was going to be another day on which nothing would please her.
He saw now that several of the contracts in the folder were the kind of confidential material not normally removed from the ministry. But upon opening th
e first of them to investigate further, he discovered to his surprise that it contained not the contract in its entirety, but merely an appendix.
What would he want with an appendix to a contract? he mused, moving on to the next. Here, too, the contents were an appendix rather than the contract itself. As he proceeded through the entire list of subfolders he realized that Stark had added appendices to at least twenty-five ministerial contracts. Each specified an atypical transfer of money, and only in connection with a development project of considerable magnitude whose budget Stark was responsible for.
He began to add the sums together and when he reached two million kroner René knew for certain that his had not been the only criminal activity taking place in the ministry.
He could hardly believe it. His most trusted and honest coworker, William Stark, had systematically siphoned off funds from their development projects and defrauded the state of two million good Danish kroner!
René smiled to himself, ignoring the sudden appearance and automatic nagging of his wife. Things were beginning to shape up.
Earlier this very same day he had managed to imply to the police that Stark had been a pedophile as well as pressured Teis Snap into abandoning the theft of his stock in Curaçao. And now this, the most important of all: he had found the man who, with complete plausibility, could be set up as being the brains behind the Baka swindle if it proved necessary to deflect the blame. The perfect scapegoat. A man who had previously embezzled a considerable sum of money from his ministry. In short, he had discovered an individual of extremely dubious morals, who precisely for that reason had rationale enough for disappearing from the face of the earth.
So, Lady Luck, it seemed, was still smiling upon him.
21
“What’s Rose going to say when we go to see Malene Kristoffersen without her?”
Carl cast a glance up at the imposing gates of Vestre prison as they drove past. How many fools had he gotten dispatched behind those dreadful walls in his time? Not so few. It was just a damned shame that they came out again.
“Rose? She’s otherwise occupied at the ministry. I reckon she’ll get over it,” Carl replied curtly. After yesterday’s shenanigans with Gordon, preferential treatment wasn’t the first thing that sprang to mind at the mention of her name. Besides, he didn’t give a toss what she’d say. He had other things to think about.
Ever since their visit to Danida’s office for evaluating development assistance he’d had a strong feeling in his bones that they had proceeded too quickly. That he should have waited to interview department head René E. Eriksen until the case had been considered from more angles.
“Tell me again why you think our visit cheered Eriksen up, Assad. I noticed a reaction when you asked him about Stark’s sexuality, but I wouldn’t exactly say it cheered him up.”
“Don’t you know what happens when you give a camel a slap on the backside, Carl? It begins to run and stretch its neck toward where it thinks its goal is. Almost as if having a long neck in itself could make it arrive faster.”
“Sounds reasonable. But what exactly are you trying to say?”
“It was like we gave Eriksen a slap on the backside when I mentioned Stark’s sexual preferences. All of a sudden he seemed to set his sights on a goal and stretched his neck out toward it faster than his legs could keep up.”
“You mean he’d been keeping a secret he wanted to get off his chest?”
“No, you do not understand, Carl. It seemed like he suddenly saw a goal that had not been there before.”
“What sort of goal?”
“That’s what I can’t work out.”
“You’re saying he was lying?”
“I don’t know. But all of a sudden there were stories that could easily have come out earlier. Stories about young boys and glances and what else the devil knows.”
“Other way around, Assad. It’s ‘and the devil knows what else.’”
“Anyway, I think Eriksen had that look in his eye like when a person is given the chance to tell a good story.”
“And?”
“It’s just that suspecting a man you work with of being a pedophile is not a good story.”
Carl turned down Sjælør Boulevard. They would soon be there. “I got the same feeling myself, now you mention it. There was a lack of . . . shame in his voice.”
The house on Strindbergsvej was typical of the era in which it was built. A sloping, French-style roof and a bit of ornamentation to make it look more imposing than building costs justified. Homes like this were often divided into two, with a dwelling on each floor so Copenhagen’s exorbitant property taxes could be spread between incomes. A small green oasis in the suburb of Valby that satisfied both the desire to live close to the city center and the dream of living farther away.
Malene Kristoffersen received them looking like she hadn’t quite come home from her package tour. The suitcases in the hall were still to be unpacked and equal parts of self-tanner and intense sunbathing on the beaches of Turkey had left her skin discolored in the peculiar way that always made people at work envious. Despite the somewhat lower temperatures at home her flowing dress was colorful and light as a feather, almost certainly purchased on her vacation. She was an attractive woman who didn’t need to advertise the fact, even though the look on Assad’s face said he was quite impressed.
“We stayed home today. We need to sometimes when Tilde’s been for her checkup. It takes quite a bit out of her,” she said. “She’s sleeping at the moment, so you’ll have to make do with me, I’m afraid.”
Assad nodded very accommodatingly. “We’d be glad to come back again if necessary,” he said with a sheepish grin.
Carl wouldn’t put it past him.
“I’m very grateful for what you’re doing,” she went on.
An unusually promising opener, so seldom heard in Carl’s line of work.
He smiled slightly. “It’s always a sad thing when people disappear. But unfortunately, finding an explanation so long after the event is often quite a hopeless task.”
“Yes, I realize that, but I still hope. William is such a lovely man.”
Assad and Carl exchanged glances. This wasn’t going to be easy.
“We’ve been to his place of work and spoken to his boss and a couple of his colleagues,” Carl said. “Mostly to gain more of an idea of what he was doing in Cameroon. Did he tell you anything about that trip before he went?”
“Yes, he did, and he wasn’t keen on having to go. Tilde was doing poorly in the hospital, and William wanted to stay home and be here for the two of us. That’s the way he is,” she explained, adding a rather sad smile by way of emphasis.
“So he was ordered to go?”
“Yes, and at short notice, too. He was told only the day before, as I remember it.”
“And what was the point of the trip?”
“They suspected one of the local helpers of running off with some of the funding.”
“A local, you say?”
“Yes. A guy named Louis. Louis Fon. William had met him on several occasions and thought he was doing a good job. I don’t think he really believed what they were saying. There was also something about Fon having sent William an odd text message, too, that had William puzzled. He sat by Tilde’s bed all evening the night before he left, trying to work out what it meant, but it just seemed like a lot of gibberish.”
“He showed it to you, then?”
“Yes. Tilde’s into texting, but she didn’t understand it either.”
“Did you speak to William after he arrived in Yaoundé?”
“No, but he did phone just after he landed in Douala. He always did that. He complained about the heat and was sorry he wasn’t home.”
“But nothing about coming back the next day?”
“No.”
There was a rasping sound a
s Assad drew his palm back and forth against the stubble of his chin. Carl could almost hear his colleague’s gray matter creaking and groaning.
“I’m sorry to have to ask you so directly, but what about the possibility of suicide? Does that sound plausible to you?”
She smiled without reservation. “William’s not like that at all. He was happy with his life and his work. The only thing that weighed on him was Tilde’s condition. He would never leave anyone in the lurch like that, least of all us.”
“And the two of you got along well together?”
She nodded. First quickly, then again, more slowly. As though the question triggered forces inside her that had accumulated over a long time. She wasn’t upset, but mentally she seemed to have reached a point where feelings of grief were no longer welcome.
“We were soul mates. Do you know what I mean?” She looked up at Carl abruptly, in a manner that felt uncomfortable considering the way he and love were doing at the moment.
Assad slid menacingly close to the edge of his chair, his introduction to a round of potential shock treatment already formulated “We heard it suggested at William’s workplace that he may have certain interests you possibly know nothing about. Have you any idea as to what they might be?”
She shook her head. “Nope, William was always very open about everything. There were only three things he really cared about. Tilde first, then me, then his job.” She smiled, as if everything about the man were unassailable. “But what were you thinking about, exactly?”
“Open about everything, you say?” Carl knew of no one but Assad who could toss a sentence into the air so vivid that it remained suspended long after a conversation had come to an end. “Would that include the most intimate of matters? Sex fantasies and such?”
She stifled a laugh, presumably because in terms of the world she lived in, she knew William Stark’s sexual desires to be as normal and predictable as could be. “How do you mean, fantasies? What’s wrong with fantasies? Don’t you have any of your own?”
The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel Page 27