by Sara Blaedel
There was no response from the bed, so Louise continued:
‘If you’re able to walk on your own, I suggest that we take my car. But I could also get an ambulance to take you, if you’d prefer?’
Finally Susanne responded by letting her eye wander a tad closer to Louise’s face. Louise quickly assessed whether she would do better to take a seat and pretend they had all the time in the world to wait until Susanne felt like she was ready to talk to her, or whether she should pressure the woman and provoke a response.
She decided on a compromise between the two.
‘There’s a coroner waiting at the centre. He is going to examine you, and then the police will take your statement. And I was actually hoping that we could talk a little bit now, before the exam.’
Susanne interrupted her. Her voice was hoarse, and when the words came out Louise could barely see Susanne’s mouth move. She had sores at the corners of her mouth, and it was obvious that she felt like the duct tape was still there.
‘A coroner examines dead people. Why is he going to examine me?’
Louise leaned in to hear what Susanne was saying. She pulled her chair over to sit by the bedside.
‘Coroners do perform autopsies on dead people, but they also examine the living,’ she said, trying to play it down, regretting her choice of terminology, forgetting that most people don’t know the nuances of police lingo. ‘They are always called in whenever a rape victim is examined at the centre.’
The tears were starting to flow down Susanne’s cheeks. Louise reached over to hold her hand, careful to avoid the woman’s IV line. She reassuringly stroked her arm as she spoke.
‘We want to make sure that we secure the evidence that the perpetrator doubtlessly left on you …’
Susanne’s silent tears became deep sobs. Her body was like a cavernous well, supplying bucket after bucket of tears.
Louise changed tactics. She would give Susanne the time she needed now. Something was loosening inside the victim, and that was worth waiting for, she thought.
Finally the crying subsided.
‘I could ride with you,’ Susanne said, drying her eyes, ‘but I don’t have any clothes.’
She sounded apologetic, as if she was ashamed that she had been naked when she was brought to the hospital.
Louise smiled at her. ‘We’ll have the nurse find you a bathrobe and a pair of slippers.’
Susanne nodded, and Louise noticed that Susanne’s eyes followed her as she stood up and went out to find someone who could help them out with some clothes.
3
In the car, Louise called Flemming Larsen’s extension. He was the coroner on duty, and she had already given him a heads-up from the car during her drive out to Hvidovre.
‘We’re on our way in now,’ she said when he picked up.
‘Good. What has she said?’
Louise avoided glancing over at Susanne Hansson, who was sitting in the passenger seat next to her. ‘Nothing.’
Flemming was silent for a second and then asked, ‘Do you want to take your statement before or after I examine her?’ he asked.
‘I’ll wait until you’re done. We’ll head straight up to the division, so we’ll see you there.’
They agreed that Flemming would wait for her to call before coming over to National Hospital from the Telium building in back, where the forensics unit was located.
Susanne sat staring out the window. Before they had left Hvidovre Hospital, the nurse had removed the glucose drip and given her a white bathrobe to wear over her hospital gown. She still looked quite dazed and battered. An aura of vulnerability and humiliation glowed around her, and it broke Louise’s heart a bit. Physically, Susanne would recover in a few weeks, but it would be a long time before that aura faded.
Louise wondered whether it would help to start their conversation while they were in the car. There wasn’t any reason to pressure her or force her to remember the events of the night until she had made it through her examination. She needs peace and quiet, Louise decided, thinking about the standard uncomfortable questions that were part of taking a statement from a rape victim. Are you sure that this was rape? That was the last thing she needed to hear right now.
She stopped at a red light and looked again at the slumped-over shape in the passenger seat. She was having a hard time judging how Susanne would respond psychologically to what awaited her during the next few hours. Right now it looked as though everything had been taken from her. The quiet in the car was conspicuous and awkward, but hard to do anything about.
Louise pulled in and parked in front of Stairwell 5, and she called the forensics unit once she had locked the car. They took the elevator up to Gynecology and continued down the corridor until they came to the small section that housed the sexual assault centre.
Louise went up to the desk to say they had arrived.
The nurse at reception came out and gave Susanne her hand. ‘Do you have any family members with you?’ she enquired.
‘No,’ Louise said, avoiding looking at Susanne.
The nurse clearly understood that Louise had seen to this, and that she and Susanne had come alone because Louise needed to get Susanne’s statement. Despite the practicality involved, the nurse did not try to hide her disapproval of Louise’s seemingly callous action.
Louise was irritated at being yet again cast in the ‘bad cop’ role, but she bit her tongue. She still found it inconceivable that people who dealt with these kinds of serious assaults professionally didn’t fully appreciate how important the medical examination and the victim’s statement were. If they were to have any hope of catching the perpetrator, having a mother sitting on the sidelines possibly dissuading her daughter from giving the police a full statement was not going to help.
‘The doctor will be by soon to take a look at you,’ the nurse told Susanne.
She avoided using the term ‘coroner’. Louise had not been as tactful, but she just didn’t think there was any reason to hide from Susanne exactly who would be performing the examination.
‘If you want it, we’ve got a bed where you can lie down until he comes,’ the nurse continued, glancing at her watch. ‘I’m sure he’s probably on his way up now. You could also wait out here, or go on into the examining room.’
That last part was directed at Louise.
At that very moment, Flemming Larsen walked in, wearing a white lab coat that fluttered around his legs. He introduced himself to Susanne and asked her to follow him.
‘You wait here,’ he told Louise, as the two of them went over into the little office that served as the examining room.
Louise wanted to go with them, but she knew that Flemming would not be happy about having so many people there as he performed his portion of the exam. A gynecologist and a nurse would also be present, so the room would be crowded, to say the least.
So she nodded and watched Flemming, who was almost six foot six, gently guide Susanne Hansson in, letting the door slide shut behind them.
If it had been any of the other doctors, she would have put up a fight. Eavesdropping on the examination could be a gold mine. Sometimes the victim would include information that would be much more valuable now than later on when it eventually showed up in some report. But she had a good working relationship with Flemming and knew that she could count on him to give her a proper account of whatever information Susanne provided.
She went into the little conference room and sat down to wait. When the coroner was done, the staff from the sexual assault centre would take over and offer Susanne a chance to take a shower and meet with their psychologist before proceeding to police headquarters to give her statement. In the meantime, Flemming would have time to fill Louise in.
Louise pulled out her phone. She wasn’t quite sure which sections of the large hospital were exempt from the mobile-phone ban, but she decided that phones would surely be allowed in the conference room.
‘Well, so much for grocery shopping,’ she said wh
en Peter answered. She had already sent him a text message while she waited for the doctor out at Hvidovre, so he was prepared.
‘You were really holding out hope, eh?’ he said with an audible grin, adding he could swing by Føtex and pick up what they needed on his way home.
‘Thanks,’ she said with an exaggerated sigh. ‘I might be quite late after all. I promise to call when I know vaguely how long it’ll take.’
‘I’ll make some dinner and put it in the fridge for you,’ he said, and she sent him a kiss over the phone, hoping that it wouldn’t be drowned out by the weak connection, which was making the line between them crackle.
Drunk on champagne on New Year’s Eve, Peter had made a solemn resolution to be more understanding and accommodating whenever Louise called to say she couldn’t make it home as planned.
The image of him holding the glass in his hand flashed before her eyes. It had irritated her a little when he’d made the promise, because he had already said the same thing when she’d agreed to let him move in with her after he returned from nine months working in Scotland. He had originally accepted a job that required him to move to Aberdeen for six months to launch a new product for the international pharmaceutical company he worked for, but then somehow it had become another three months, and ultimately he hadn’t returned to Denmark until just before Christmas.
‘Right back at you,’ he said, and she smiled at the phone as she hung up and put it back in her bag. She browsed a little through an old magazine and read an article about a young woman with leukaemia who needed a bone-marrow transplant to survive. The problem was that the worldwide donor registry didn’t have a single donor with the exact same tissue type as this girl. Hardly the mood-lifting reading material she was hoping for.
After an hour, Louise guessed that they were probably finishing up with the examination and went out to the corridor to see if she could find a pot of coffee and a couple of cups somewhere nearby.
‘Good thinking,’ Flemming said ten minutes later, as he sat down across from her.
She poured coffee into a cup and pushed it toward him. ‘How is she?’ she asked.
‘She went through something pretty violent,’ he said.
Louise had already set a notepad and pen out on the table. She pulled them toward her and looked at him expectantly as he blew on his coffee.
‘There was both vaginal and anal penetration,’ he said, setting his cup down in front of him.
She started taking notes.
‘There are fresh bleeding tears in the posterior wall of the entry to the vagina, and three tears in the skin radiating outward from the anus.’
‘Did you find any semen?’
The words and tone made it sound as if this were the kind of stuff ordinary people talked about, day in and day out, but without this seemingly cavalier handling of the grim medical aspects of assault, it would have been impossible for them both to keep doing this, day in and day out.
‘Nothing immediately visible, but she had some fluorescent stains on her back that may have come from semen, so I secured samples of those.’
Louise looked up from her notepad and asked, ‘Was there any in her pubic hair?’
Flemming shook his head and said, ‘He could hardly have penetrated her from the front the way her legs were lashed together. I think he penetrated her only from behind.’ Then he added, smiling dryly, ‘But in this case, if he had approached her from the front, we would probably have found some evidence.’
To Flemming’s great annoyance, it no longer seemed to be fashionable for women to have any pubic hair at all. That information made Louise chuckle in spite of herself, and made her feel extremely old-fashioned.
‘What about the rest of her body?’ Louise sketched a human body, ready to mark the locations where Susanne had been assaulted.
‘There are bleeding erosions from the gag that he stuffed into her mouth,’ he said.
Louise marked this on her sketch before he continued.
‘Its ends were jammed against both corners of her mouth and cut their way into her skin. I’m assuming that the gag was left in the apartment and that it’s already been brought in to forensics,’ he added.
Louise had seen the forensic unit’s impressive collection of gags, and the mere sight of all the horrible things perpetrators had come up with to stuff into their victims’ mouths to keep them from screaming made Louise’s cheeks burn as if she had been gagged as well. There was everything from wooden blocks in socks to various heavy wires wrapped in duct tape or bandages.
‘And then there are two small blisters in the rectangular area where the duct tape had been – a hypersensitivity response, I’m assuming,’ Flemming said. He continued: ‘In addition, she took some powerful blows to the face.’
‘Was it someone she knew?’ Louise asked, setting her pen down in front of her.
‘His name is Jesper Bjergholdt,’ the coroner said, glancing down at his notes, which he had stashed in the pocket of his lab coat, ‘and he lives on H. C. Ørstedsvej.’
Louise pulled out her phone and dialled Lars Jørgensen. Obviously, she should have asked Susanne herself while they were in the car. While she waited for her partner to answer, she urged Flemming to keep talking.
‘They went out to dinner last night, Monday night, but I wasn’t able to really find out whether they had known each other for a long time or whether they had just met,’ he said, a little apologetically. ‘She made a big point of explaining that they had had a nice evening and that she doesn’t understand what suddenly happened.’
Louise nodded to indicate that she was still listening.
‘As we were finishing up, she started hinting that it may not actually have been him at all,’ the coroner continued, gesturing with one hand to signal his doubt, ‘but she can’t explain what became of him and how another person could have got into the apartment.’
He paused to weigh his words.
‘She’s pretty upset, though; there’s no doubt about that. She’s talking with the psychologist right now.’
‘Could this Bjergholdt have slipped something into her drink?’ Louise asked.
‘That is obviously a possibility, but at the moment I don’t think so. We took a blood sample to send to the lab.’
‘This will just take a sec,’ she said into the phone when her partner finally answered from Susanne’s apartment. ‘The suspect’s name is Jesper Bjergholdt, he lives on H. C. Ørstedsvej, and they had been out to eat.’
She looked at Flemming and asked ‘Where?’
He shrugged and shook his head.
‘I don’t know where,’ she said to Jørgensen, ‘but I’ll call you once I’ve talked to her. See you later.’
She was about to hang up when it occurred to her that Susanne would probably appreciate leaving the sexual assault centre in something other than a bathrobe. She added, ‘Do you think you could find some clothes in her closet and make sure they get over here? Then I’ll bring her back to headquarters.’
She put the phone in her bag and looked at her notepad to remind herself of how far they had got. Then she asked Flemming to continue.
‘There are skin abrasions around her wrists and ankles, all the way around, about one centimetre wide, consistent with her hands having been bound behind her back with cable ties.’
Louise took notes in the same clinical language.
‘There are also ligature marks from the cable ties because he had pulled them so tight. My guess is that her hands were dark purple and swollen when the paramedics cut her out of the bands, but by the time I examined her the swelling had gone down and the colour was normal.’
Once everything had been written down, they sat and talked a little about the summer vacation Flemming was planning to take with his kids. It was the first time they would be going on vacation alone without his former wife since the separation, and the kids were excited about the idea of spending it in a covered wagon that would drive them through the forests of central Jutland.
‘They really want to sleep in tents and cook their meals over a campfire,’ he said, shaking his head before standing up and following her back out into the corridor.
They had just said goodbye when one of the psychologists called down the corridor after Louise.
‘Right now she’s suppressing what happened,’ the psychologist said when she caught up with Louise. ‘She’s clear on most of the evening; but once they reach the bedroom, the chain of events gets foggy. I’ve referred her to a private-practice psychologist and recommended that she contact him in the next couple of days.’
Louise nodded and prepared herself for what could be a long victim’s statement if they were first going to have to make their way through a layer of repressed memories. Maybe we’re not going to get anywhere.
She knocked on the door as she entered the small examining room where Susanne was lying.
‘Some of your clothes are on their way over here,’ she said, coming closer to her. ‘Once you’re dressed, we’ll drive over to police headquarters.’
Susanne closed both eyes. The whole left side of her face had swollen up so severely that Louise was surprised she could open that eye at all. The skin on her cheekbone was a mess.
‘I know you’re tired and aren’t feeling particularly well, but it’s important for us to talk about what happened,’ she said, feeling sorry for Susanne and sorry for herself, too, that she had to keep pushing her. ‘It’s important because we’d really like to get the guy that did this. But it’s also important for you to get everything you’ve got pent up and eating away at your insides out in the open. It helps to talk about it.’
She hoped that her words were making their way in past Susanne’s closed eyes. As she finished talking, someone knocked on the door, and Louise stepped over to open it. Outside stood a uniformed officer with a bag in his hand.
‘Thank you so much,’ Louise said, smiling and taking the bag, deciding not to let him into the room. She stepped back over to Susanne.