Blue Blood (Louise Rick)

by Sara Blaedel

  She nodded in understanding and thanked him before proceeding to the next restaurant, no longer feeling optimistic. Susanne was not the kind of person you would notice in a crowd, and she figured this Jesper Bjergholdt would have done as little as possible to attract attention to himself.

  Louise stopped to look at the oversized flowerbed with its enormous blossoms, standing with majestic pride. She cast a quick glance at her watch and strolled over to a bench to sit for a second and enjoy the view. She closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun, feeling the warmth permeate her. Without a thought in her head, she let herself be carried away by the light.

  When she figured she couldn’t afford to stay any longer, she opened her eyes and sat there, watching the patrons dining at Perlen with its big windowed façade. She was lost in thought and actually wasn’t all that surprised when she suddenly caught sight of Peter.

  He was sitting at a table right by the window, and a blonde girl was just sitting down across from him. Louise leaned forward a little on the bench. Based on the length of her hair, it could be Camilla. She decided to go in and say hi, but as she got closer, she realised that the girl sitting across from Peter was his sales rep, Lina. They must be sitting there waiting for a client. Louise quickly sat back down and hoped they hadn’t noticed her, because she had no desire or time to be introduced and then be forced to explain that she was working, looking for witnesses at the surrounding restaurants.

  She then walked over toward Balkonen, which had a large outdoor patio on the ground floor, with just a stone balustrade separating it from Plaenen’s lawn and footpaths. Before she went in, she pulled the picture of Susanne out of her purse again and took a deep breath.

  ‘Well, let me just find out who was here on Monday,’ the waiter said willingly, once she’d explained why she was there.

  She stood there, looking around. A young woman was balancing a tray full of beers, the tray the size of the bottom of an oil barrel. She held on tight as she wove her way through the restaurant over to a table where a group of young guys were seated, teasing each other about how many beers they could drink without throwing up when they rode the Demon afterward.

  Louise thought back to one time she’d come to Tivoli with Camilla and a group of guys about the same age as these. Back then, one of the group had thrown up on the roller-coaster, although thankfully it was not Louise. She didn’t have a chance to draw her memories fully out of the fog, because suddenly the waiter was beckoning her toward the very back of the restaurant.

  ‘Olsen,’ he said, pointing to a man with an enormous moustache, who was talking to somebody standing in the kitchen.

  The waiter disappeared again, and Louise stood there waiting for Olsen to finish his conversation.

  ‘I totally didn’t think she’d be back for it herself,’ he said after studying the picture for a second. Before Louise had a chance to react to his cryptic comment, he turned around and disappeared again toward the kitchen.

  Irritated, she started to follow him, but stopped when he returned a moment later with a lavender cardigan in his hand.

  ‘Here it is,’ he said, holding it out to her.

  Louise started to explain she wasn’t here about a lost item of clothing. She was looking for the man who had been dining with the woman in the picture.

  Olsen was still standing there with the cardigan dangling, and it didn’t seem like he was interested in hearing any more about why she was there. She guessed that they must be serving the meals for the staff in the back, so he was eager to get rid of her as quickly as possible.

  ‘So this woman in the picture was here?’ Louise hurriedly said to keep his attention.

  He nodded and hung the cardigan over her arm. ‘We stuck it in the lost-and-found for her in the back, once we realised she’d left it.’

  So far, Louise was following him. She found it a little odd that Susanne hadn’t mentioned that she’d forgot her cardigan. ‘Can you remember who she was here with?’

  ‘Nope.’ Olsen glanced over at the staircase that led up to the balcony on the upper floor. ‘But I can show you where they sat.’

  Louise followed him, hoping it might jog his memory if he showed her where they’d eaten.

  ‘They sat over there in the corner.’ He made a gesture with his head. ‘She was with her boyfriend, I assume,’ he said, sounding like he was striving to tell the police officer what she wanted to hear. He wasn’t particularly convincing, and Louise got the sense that he was guessing instead of telling her something that was actually stored in his memory.

  ‘What makes you think they were boyfriend and girlfriend?’ Louise asked, studying him closely to observe any reactions that might be evident in his face. ‘What did he look like? Were they holding hands, or was it something one of them said?’

  Her questions were curt and terse, meant to emphasise that he should keep his guesswork to himself and share only concrete information he was sure of.

  ‘Obviously I’m not sure …’ he said after thinking about it for a moment.

  ‘So, on Monday night you served the woman in the picture and the man she was with?’ Louise fished slowly.

  Olsen was starting to get irritated now, too. ‘You couldn’t really say that. It wasn’t my table. I had that group of tables over there.’ He pointed over toward the opposite side of the room. ‘But I noticed them, because she forgot her sweater. I closed that night, so I took over the tables that were left so the other waiters could go home.’

  ‘Great,’ Louise said and pulled a chair back from a table, which had already been set, to lean on the backrest. ‘Can you remember what the man looked like?’

  Olsen glanced over toward the table he said Susanne had been sitting at. ‘They were a calm, quiet couple. I think they had kind of a pricey meal.’

  ‘How did he pay?’ Louise maintained eye contact with Olsen. ‘With a credit card?’ she tried hopefully.

  ‘He didn’t. I’m sure of that. He paid in cash, and I’m not all that sure that he was Danish.’ Something suddenly occurred to him. ‘When I put the sweater into our lost-and-found, I told the other waiters that no one was ever going to come claim it … and I said that because I felt like they were tourists.’

  Louise was losing hope that this would lead to anything at all. If nothing else, Susanne would have at least noticed if Jesper Bjergholdt had spoken with an accent.

  Olsen shrugged. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, but I couldn’t really tell you that for sure. We see too many customers in here for me to be able to keep them all straight, and especially when it comes to customers I didn’t even serve. But I’m sure it was her.’ He pointed to Susanne’s photo. ‘And I’m sure she was sitting with a dark-haired man, who I assumed was a foreigner. I can’t tell you any more than that with any degree of certainty.’

  Louise thanked him and stuffed the photo back in her purse. Then she started toward the exit with Susanne’s sweater over her arm, thinking it would probably be a good idea to send it down to the crime-scene investigators. Not that it was very likely they would find anything on it, but it was worth a try.

  ‘Restaurant Balkonen,’ she said in response to the hopeful look Lars gave her. Then she shook her head and added, ‘Nada.’

  She stuffed Susanne’s sweater into one of the CSI’s paper sacks, wrote the case number on the outside and put it on the bookshelf by the door so she would remember to drop it off.

  ‘They ate there and she left this. Bjergholdt paid in cash. Strangely the waiter was able to remember that, but otherwise his recollections were pretty limited.’

  She went in and dropped off her report for Heilmann.

  ‘I’ve got the names of twelve women who exchanged messages with Mr Noble,’ Lars said when she walked back in.

  ‘Have you contacted any of them?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet. But when you set up a profile, you have to provide an email address.’ He showed her a piece of paper with a list of email addresses on it.

 
‘Do you have to give your own email address?’ Louise looked at him in surprise, assuming up until this point that people could just set up dummy accounts.

  ‘It’s only visible to the company that runs the site, so they can send information to their customers.’

  She noticed a quiet germ of anticipation starting to sprout. They hadn’t hit a total brick wall. Once they pinned down the description a little more, she would talk to Susanne again, and then they could go to the press and search for him. She felt a primal joy at the thought of interrogating him after they caught him. Just you wait, you sadistic pig, she thought and went over to find the folder for the case on Kim Jensen from Hørsholm, who’d disappeared into thin air. Karin Hvenegaard was the name of the woman he had raped. She lived in Rødovre, and Louise wrote the phone number down on her notepad and picked up the phone.

  She sat drumming her fingers on her desk while she waited for the phone to be picked up. A quiet click told her it had gone to voicemail; but instead of the subscriber’s own voice, there was a recorded operator’s voice saying that the number was no longer in service. Louise sighed and hung up. She called information and asked if there was a new number for that name.

  ‘It’s unlisted,’ the woman replied.

  Louise went through the complicated procedure the police used to circumvent the standard security measures and access unlisted numbers.

  ‘She doesn’t have a landline and there’s no mobile phone number listed for that address,’ the woman said after an artificial pause.

  ‘Thanks,’ Louise said and hung up, thinking it might not hurt to drive out to the address the next day. She dialled Heilmann’s extension and explained that Karin Hvenegaard no longer had a phone. She could tell from Heilmann’s voice that she wasn’t going to sanction Louise putting this off until tomorrow, so she hurried to add that she’d find her in the Danish national population registry and then go pay her a visit in person.

  She knew she wouldn’t make it home in time for dinner now, but Peter was prepared for that, and it occurred to her that she didn’t even know if he was home. His New Year’s resolution seemed to be working, because it had been a long time since he’d complained about her unpredictable work hours.

  She packed up her bag and nodded absent-mindedly to Lars, who was talking on the phone. Thoughts of Peter were running through her head. She didn’t have the least desire to live apart from him, but she also didn’t feel any pressure to spend time with him, either, now that he lived with her. Although they’d been going out together for six years, she’d been afraid, when Peter moved into her apartment, that living together would start making her feel chronically suffocated; but to her own surprise, she was actually enjoying his being there. She had quietly admitted to herself that her dread of his being a ball and chain had proven to be unfounded, and she had slowly forced it out of her mind. She was starting to have a much more relaxed view of their future together.

  10

  Blommevej. Louise was driving out along Roskildevej, the main road from Copenhagen to Roskilde, keeping her eyes peeled for Tårnvej, where she was supposed to take a right. From there, she was supposed to find the road that went down to the neighbourhood with all the terraced houses. She was concentrating on driving and looking for the right address; but although she was close, she was having a hard time seeing any system to the numbering. So she decided to park and search for 211F on foot.

  The first conversation she’d had with Karin Hvenegaard two years earlier had been at the Centre for Victims of Sexual Assault, the same place she’d taken Susanne. Karin had come in to the police headquarters a couple of times since then, but Louise had never been out to her house before.

  She pulled over in front of a small cluster of two-storey houses. Number 211F was on the second floor, but there wasn’t any name on the mailbox. Louise was starting to suspect that Karin didn’t live here any more, or maybe she’d just listed the Blommevej address as her permanent address and lived somewhere else that they didn’t have on record. Louise rang the doorbell and leaned against the railing while she waited.

  When the door opened, Louise recognised Karin right away, even though she had a totally different air about her now than the way Louise remembered her. She hadn’t shrunk in a physical sense. And yet there wasn’t much left of the woman who, even in the battered and miserable state she had been in two years earlier, had projected so much more vitality than the woman standing in the doorway before her now. She was hunched over, fear in her eyes, which were looking more downward than straight ahead. It was obvious that she remembered Louise, but she did not seem surprised or curious. She just stood there, with a neutral expression, waiting for whatever was going to come.

  ‘Could I come in?’ Louise asked after a second.

  Karin stepped aside.

  It had been a long time since they’d talked to each other. The last time they’d spoken, Louise had told her that she didn’t think they were going to be able to find Kim Jensen, her attacker, and Karin had seemed to accept that. She said something about that being the way things went when you went swimming out where you couldn’t touch the bottom and the current carried you away. She had nodded and thanked them for trying, and then she’d been given a lift home and had disappeared from Louise’s life and thoughts.

  Until today, Louise hadn’t even wondered how she was doing, or even whether she was still alive, and that realisation stung a little as she stepped into Karin’s apartment.

  Karin still hadn’t asked why Louise had suddenly turned up, and Louise couldn’t discern any glimmer of curiosity in Karin’s eyes to suggest that she might ask. Instead, once they’d reached the living room, Karin asked, ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

  Lunch was sitting in a pan on the table along with two plates and a pitcher of juice. Karin lived alone with her young daughter. Louise worked out that she must be almost four.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Louise replied.

  The place had an open floor plan, so the living room and kitchen were one space. Louise said hello to Karin’s daughter, who was playing on the floor of her room, and then joined Karin in the kitchen, taking the two mugs Karin handed her from the cupboard.

  ‘I came to talk to you about Kim Jensen. We’re dealing with a rape case that is sort of similar to what you went through. Obviously we don’t know if it’s him,’ Louise hastened to add. ‘But I’ve read through your police report again, and there are some similarities that indicate it might be the same perpetrator. So I’ve come to see if I could get you to provide a few more details, even though we went through all of this back then.’

  Karin finally turned around and looked right at her.

  ‘Do you think you’re up to talking about it?’ Louise hurriedly asked when she saw the blank look in Karin’s eyes. It wouldn’t help if Karin’s answer were no, but Louise didn’t want to push her too hard.

  Karin nodded and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Of course. If I can help.’

  She walked over to the table and gathered the plates and glasses onto a tray, brought them back to the kitchen, and started washing the dishes. Without uttering a word.

  Louise took a deep breath. ‘How’s work going?’

  Karin had been working at a day-care when they last spoke, the lead teacher in her classroom. She was a slender woman, thirty-one years old. A woman who had seemed fully committed to whatever she was involved in. While taking her statement, the police learned she had been raising her daughter alone since the little girl was almost two; and between work and her child, it was nearly impossible to find time to date. She had decided to look for a boyfriend online in the hopes of making a family again.

  ‘I’m not working any more,’ Karin said in a monotone as she pulled out a kitchen towel and started drying the dishes.

  Louise was starting to get an uncomfortable sense of what had happened during the two intervening years, or perhaps more accurately what hadn’t happened. It had struck her the instant she stepped into the living room: there
was something stagnant about the place. A stack of magazines lay under the coffee table, but there was no energy in the room, no spark, no spirit. Just emptiness, like a vacation home that had been closed up – and yet there were two people spending their days here.

  They sat opposite each other around the coffee table. Louise had her notepad ready, and she scrutinised Karin, trying to determine what was going on inside her shut-down exterior. How was she responding to being contacted by the police again? Was she hoping that Kim Jensen would finally be caught, or was she indifferent after all this time?

  ‘I want to ask you to think back and try to describe Kim Jensen’s physical appearance for me in as much detail as you can. In the police report you said that he didn’t have any particularly distinguishing features, but try your best to describe what he looked like.’

  Karin sat there, staring at the coffee table. ‘The whole time since it happened, I’ve been trying to erase him from my memory. I’ve closed my eyes many times and imagined his face being swallowed by flames, but it never worked. His eyes keep burning into me. They follow me everywhere, watching everything I do.’

  She spoke softly, slowly, as if it took a great deal of effort to choose her words. ‘He had dark brown hair, short, slightly wavy, sort of a little combed back.’ She closed her eyes and sat there in silence for a moment. ‘He had really pretty eyes, greenish brown, and heavy, dark eyebrows. He had soft, full lips. Not really big lips, but they were unusual. If he’d been a woman, I think you would say he had a sensual mouth. Do people say that about men too?’

  A shiver ran down Louise’s spine. Karin’s voice had suddenly changed. There was a passionate warmth to her words, one that shouldn’t be there because she was describing the man who had practically murdered her.

  Sick, Louise thought, she must be sick. Something was very wrong. The woman across from her was drowning, and it didn’t seem like anyone was doing anything about it. On the contrary, it seemed like a process that was calmly, quietly succeeding.