The Stolen Angel

by Sara Blaedel

  “That’s because you don’t know the story,” Camilla insisted when Louise reiterated her doubts.

  “True,” Louise conceded. “But how can I when you won’t tell me what else he said and what grounds he gave for his suspicion?”

  Camilla spooned up the last of her ice cream before lifting her coffee mug and putting her feet up on the table. “I’m not ready for you to pass it on,” she said, like a teenager with a secret.

  Louise shook her head. As things stood she had no idea what, if anything, she might be able to share with others. All she knew was that Camilla had fallen in love with Walther Sachs-Smith’s eldest son, Frederik, whom she had met while traveling down the West Coast of the United States, and that she must have gleaned some information in Hawaii seeing as how she was now prepared to involve the chief superintendent of the Mid and West Zealand Police.

  “My lips are sealed,” Louise promised, and sensed a niggling unease begin to displace her annoyance at Jonas still not having come home.

  4

  My wife did not take her own life. She was murdered.”

  Walther Sachs-Smith had fixed his unblinking gaze on Camilla’s to emphasize his assertion.

  She could still picture him and almost feel the wind blowing in from the ocean as they sat on the deck in front of the beach house on the island of Kauai. The Pacific had been anything but, and the waves had been increasing in strength like the gusts that battered the tops of the palm trees. Camilla had felt the same when the aging man leaned toward her with a furrowed brow and sadness in his eyes.

  “The killing was camouflaged as a suicide,” he explained. “But I could tell they’d been inside the house. They killed Inger, but they didn’t get what they came for.”

  For a moment he sat there pensively while Camilla studied him.

  At the time she met Walther Sachs-Smith he had been missing without a trace since his wife’s funeral some two months previously, and Camilla knew only what she had read in the papers: His wife had committed suicide and had been found in her bedroom with a pair of empty pill bottles on her bedside table. Like the rest of the country, Camilla had been gripped by the story when the widower disappeared only days after the funeral without leaving any kind of message for his three grown-up children, his son and daughter in Denmark, and his eldest son Frederik, who had settled in Santa Barbara, California.

  “Before the snarling pack gets hold of me, I intend to go to the police and make them understand my wife was the victim of a crime. Which is why I need your help.”

  There was a determination behind his words, and he lit up a cigarette as he spoke.

  The man in front of her was somewhere in his late sixties, but she knew little else about him apart from the fact that he was one of Denmark’s most well-known businessmen. He looked fit and tanned. His shirt hung loose and his hair was still dark, though increasingly streaked with gray. Beneath his left eye was a characteristic scar that in photographs made his laugh lines stand out even more.

  “How can you be so sure it was murder when there were empty pill bottles beside her bed?” Camilla probed, reaching out quickly to save her glass when a particularly harsh gust of wind nearly caused the tablecloth to fly up like a kite.

  “Because,” he began, putting his hand down on the table to keep the cloth in place, his chunky wedding ring conspicuous on his finger. “Because Inger would never take her own life. It sounds so banal, I know, but Isabella, our little granddaughter, meant so much to her. After my daughter’s divorce my wife spent a great deal of time with our grandchild, several times a week in fact. She couldn’t be without her, not for anything in the world. And in all humility I like to think she valued our own time together too highly as well. She would never just give up on life because of a few ripples on the pond.”

  Ripples on the pond. That was one way of putting it, Camilla thought.

  Walther Sachs-Smith and his window-making company, Termo-Lux, were among the wealthiest in the country, and the concise version had it that while preparing to hand off power in the company he was ousted by his board and the executive leadership comprising his two youngest children, Carl Emil and Rebekka, who had conspired against him together with the company’s new attorney. The despicable coup had shocked business desks throughout the media. As soon as it became known that Sachs-Smith had been overthrown by his own offspring, news hounds quickly linked Inger Sachs-Smith’s suicide with the family scandal.

  “Besides, she would never have had the courage,” he said, interrupting Camilla’s thoughts. “But none of that is the real reason I can say beyond a doubt that her death was foul play.”

  She looked at him, curious, and asked him to continue.

  “The day my wife died, the Angel of Death was taken from my office,” he said after a pause during which he gazed quietly out at the surf.

  “I realize it may be necessary to inform the police that we two have spoken if you are to convince them to reexamine Inger’s death, but apart from that I suggest it would be wisest not to mention our meeting to anyone else,” he said, adding with a wry smile: “That would include my eldest son, even if he did lend you the house here. I need time before I go home and pick up the gauntlet.”

  Camilla felt herself blush for a moment before setting all thought of Frederik Sachs-Smith aside and concentrating on his father instead. Something about him had changed compared with the pictures she knew from the newspapers and magazines. He had shrunk. Not physically, but somehow he seemed to be diminished. It wasn’t hard to see the grief in the darkness of his gaze. Most likely the change had already occurred when his wife had been found. Or it could have come gradually, during the time he had kept himself hidden.

  “The Angel of Death?” she ventured.

  “A long story,” he replied. “I won’t tire you with it.”

  “I’ve got plenty of time,” she replied quickly, at the same moment catching a glimpse of Markus inside the house where he had retreated from the weather. The air was still warm, but the wind had begun to stir up eddies of sand and they had withdrawn under the bamboo roof that covered the deck. She wanted to continue their conversation, feeling a need for distraction and sensing to her great pleasure that her reporter instinct seemed to be fully intact.

  At the time she and Markus had taken off on their West Coast adventure, she had, to put it mildly, been in doubt as to whether she would ever return to journalism. She had quit her job as a reporter on Morgenavisen’s crime desk after a story had brought her to the brink of nervous collapse, and although she hesitated to admit it, she realized that her trip to the United States with her son was an escape designed to stave off her descent into a deep depression.

  The trip hadn’t worked out as Camilla had imagined. She had hoped to find peace and the answers to some questions, but had instead found herself stricken with grief when the news from home came that Signe Fasting-Thomsen from Markus’s class at school had been killed in a tragic car accident. Conversely, she had harbored no expectation at all that during the trip she would fall in love, and right now she was keenly aware of how impractical it was to have taken a fancy to a fabulously wealthy unmarried Dane who had settled in the United States.

  She picked up the stack of colorful Hawaii postcards she and Markus had bought to tease family and friends back home in the darkness of the Danish winter, turning them over and using them as a convenient notepad.

  “Very well,” said Walther Sachs-Smith. “We have made an agreement, after all.”

  Camilla nodded. They had indeed. Camilla had promised to do everything she could to encourage the police to investigate his wife’s death as a murder case. He for his part had granted her exclusive rights to the story.

  “Most religious scholars believe that the Angel of Death was lost when the Byzantine Empire was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. But in art history circles the belief is that the icon was saved and brought to safety before the Hagia Sophia’s conversion into a mosque. If it hadn’t been, they say, it would
have turned up when the church was restored by two Swiss architects in the late nineteenth century.”

  “So it was, then?” Camilla interrupted, looking up at him inquiringly. “Saved, I mean?”

  Walther Sachs-Smith nodded deliberately, his heavy gaze turned inward. “Yes, it was,” he confirmed.

  They sat for a moment in silence.

  “When my father was twenty years old,” he eventually went on, “he established a glazier’s business in a basement shop in Roskilde. He had just married my mother, who was from Poland, where her father was employed by the church at Wroclaw, southwest of Warsaw. A couple of years later my father was commissioned to restore some stained-glass windows in Roskilde Cathedral. Through my maternal grandfather he purchased a lot consisting of some very beautiful old church windows still in their frames that had been lying about for centuries in the attic of the church.”

  He paused and looked up at Camilla.

  “It’s never the same, you see, if you put new glass in,” he explained. Along with his father he had built up a life’s work in the field of double glazing, and Camilla sensed his expertise. “It’s like with old houses, always best to retain the old panes no matter how imperfect. The light they cast possesses so much more beauty, it’s as simple as that.”

  Camilla nodded. She’d had the same discussion with the chairman of her housing cooperative after they decided to renovate the windows in her building. They ended up reusing the old glass for that very reason.

  “My father traveled to Poland himself and fetched the windows. They were big and heavy, and in order to avoid the marvelous glass being broken during transport he left the panes in their iron frames. Some of the glass had been painted over at some later stage and needed stripping, while some merely had to be dusted down,” Sachs-Smith continued, adding that it was while his father had been at work washing the layers of filth from the panes of a double-winged window that the Angel of Death had emerged before him. There was something so special about it he became curious and eventually found out that the glass icon had once embellished the Hagia Sophia. After the Ottoman conquest many icons and mosaics featuring Christian motifs were painted over or else removed completely.

  “But in—” Camilla began, only to stop herself when he raised his hand.

  “Let me just finish this, if I may,” he said. “Subsequently, my Polish grandfather was accused of theft from the church. As a result, he suffered serious vilification at the hands of the parish council, the whole sorry state of affairs ending in 1935 with his being forced to give up his position, banished to a small house outside the city, his reputation tarnished beyond repair, a common thief in people’s eyes. According to my father, this came as a very severe blow to the family insofar as his father-in-law had done nothing at all improper. Before allowing my father to purchase the glass he had secured permission from the priest to make the sale and thereby earn funds for the church. Yet when the parish council brought the matter to the bishop, the priest had conveniently forgotten the agreement entirely.”

  He shook his head and sat quietly for a moment with eyes closed.

  Something had clearly departed him, Camilla realized. The strength in his voice, the charisma that had previously been his hallmark in TV interviews. Sitting opposite her now he seemed old and vulnerable.

  The sun had finally disappeared behind the blanket of cloud that had threatened all morning. Camilla wondered whether they should go inside, but then he opened his eyes again.

  “You can imagine the consequences for my grandparents if it had become known that the celebrated icon had been hidden away among the glass my grandfather had found in the church and sold to his son-in-law.”

  Camilla nodded. She had run out of postcards on which to make notes, but it didn’t matter. She would remember this part of the story without them.

  “My father never really spoke of it. Yet for all this time it has been such a part of the family history, the fact that he discovered something so precious in that consignment of glass he took home from Poland. But not once did he ever mention the Angel of Death.”

  Walther Sachs-Smith became pensive again before continuing.

  “He ought to have handed it in at the time,” he said. “But he didn’t want to cause any more problems for his parents-in-law. They were old by then, and the rumors had started, claiming they had sold a valuable cultural treasure and hidden the money away for themselves. They were never able to shed that suspicion, and it clung to my mother’s sisters, too, who had grown up amid all the accusations and who are still alive today. When my father died, the family secret was passed on to me, and with it the responsibility of shielding the Polish side of the family from any more trouble.”

  “The Angel of Death,” Camilla mused, her eyes absently scanning the ocean with its whitecapped waves. How easy the most experienced surfers made it look, riding the waves that crashed against the shore. “The merciful angel who comes for people’s souls when they pass on?”

  The elderly man’s eyes glazed over and Camilla glanced away, allowing him a moment of privacy for his grief.

  “I believe so, yes,” he nodded, his voice choking up.

  At once he collected himself and leaned toward her.

  “Many years ago I had a copy made of the icon, which I hung up in my office at home. A kind of alarm, you might say. It didn’t look like much on its own, but if it were ever to disappear I would know that someone was on the trail of the real Angel.”

  “And that copy vanished the day your wife died?”

  He nodded again, his gaze tinged with sadness. “My secret has been discovered.”

  “By whom?” Camilla asked in near-breathless anticipation, following him with her eyes as he rose to remove the cloth from the table.

  “If only I knew,” he replied. “All I do know is that they’ll be back as soon as they figure out that what they made off with was a copy.”

  5

  Louise had fetched the rest of the ice cream and reached now for Camilla’s bowl. She could hardly say she blamed Nymand for calling her at Police HQ to hear what she made of Camilla’s claim that Inger Sachs-Smith’s death, far from being a suicide, was in fact murder, and her insistence that the police in Roskilde should reopen the case immediately. He had also asked for her take on Camilla’s theory that the perpetrator had camouflaged the killing to make it look like suicide. All the forensic results from the scene, including analyses of the empty pill bottles on Inger Sachs-Smith’s bedside table, pointed toward suicide as the most likely cause.

  “Personally I don’t think you’ve anything to lose by taking Camilla’s inquiry seriously,” Louise had told him, suggesting furthermore that the chief superintendent at least let the forensic chemists screen the samples taken during Inger Sachs-Smith’s autopsy one more time to make sure.

  The Sachs-Smiths were well-known and highly respected people in Roskilde, and Walther Sachs-Smith was beyond doubt the city’s most valuable taxpayer. For that reason alone, whether one liked it or not, his influence was enormous. Louise herself would under no circumstances fail to act on even the slightest suspicion the billionaire’s wife had been unlawfully killed—especially since Sachs-Smith himself had gone into hiding, fearful of his life, as Camilla had argued.

  “I suppose some things aren’t always immediately apparent in the ordinary analyses,” Nymand had eventually conceded. “Even if they do screen pretty much across the board these days.”

  “Nymand said they got the results back from the Department of Forensic Medicine,” said Camilla, putting her ice cream down.

  Louise nodded noncommittally. She couldn’t quite fathom Camilla’s motives for involving herself so fiercely in a case that in all probability wasn’t a case at all.

  The most obvious reason was that she had been served Walther Sachs-Smith on a silver platter while everyone else thought he had vanished off the face of the earth, and as was typical for Camilla she had secured the exclusive rights to his story. Clearly, that mig
ht be enough reason on its own for her to be so eager about it, Louise thought, studying her friend closely.

  “What makes you so certain Sachs-Smith is right?” she asked, wincing at the skepticism in her voice.

  “It’s not me who’s certain,” Camilla retorted with ill-concealed annoyance. “It’s him.”

  “Yes, I know that,” Louise protested. “But you believe him.”

  “Because he is right,” Camilla said, going on to tell her how the forensic chemists in Copenhagen had sent a blood sample from Inger Sachs-Smith’s autopsy to a lab in Germany. “The Germans have discovered a method to pinpoint instances of insulin overdose. In large amounts, diabetes medicine is lethal.”

  “Insulin?” Louise raised an eyebrow.

  “Inger Sachs-Smith’s youngest son has suffered from diabetes ever since he was a child. They’ve always kept insulin in the house.”

  They sat quietly for a moment and looked at each other.

  “Could she have taken it by mistake?” Louise ventured after a while.

  Her friend shook her head. “It was injected into a muscle, and we’re talking about a dosage big enough to kill several people at once. That kind of thing doesn’t happen by mistake.”

  Louise shook her head and conceded she was right. “What about her son?”

  Camilla gave a shrug. “He’s certainly got access to insulin.”

  Louise nodded.

  “The police already know from the first examinations that she ingested sleeping pills,” Camilla went on. “That much is obvious, since they were found in her stomach. Nymand has a theory the perpetrator took advantage of the drowsiness they induced. Most likely he dissolved a couple more in water and forced her to drink. After that he could comfortably inject the insulin into a muscle. The hypodermic is so thin the pathologist just failed to see any mark to begin with. The empty pill bottles were designed to lead the police up the garden path, and they went right along.”

  “Good God!” Louise exclaimed, her thoughts suddenly racing. It was plausible indeed. An almost perfect crime.