The Stolen Angel

by Sara Blaedel

  Louise wriggled her hands into the gloves and went to unlock the door.

  * * *

  The apartment was dark. They stood and listened for a moment before opening the door wide and stepping inside to switch on the lights. Two rows of recessed lights in the ceiling illuminated the hallway from above, their light falling on the coats that hung from the hooks on one wall and the sports bag dumped just inside the door.

  Nymand ventured inside the living room while Louise and the other officer continued down the hall. She turned the light on in the bedroom and saw an untidy bed with clothes strewn all about, as if they had been wrenched indiscriminately from the wardrobe. Nymand’s man had gone on into the kitchen and switched on the lights there.

  They began to search through the apartment in silence until the officer suddenly called for them to come.

  “Look here.”

  He had opened the door of the room that was opposite Carl Emil’s bedroom.

  The bed was unmade and there were DVDs of dancing movies and little girl’s clothes all over the floor. Over by the wall was a small red shoulder bag.

  Louise went over and crouched down to open the bag.

  “We need to go through this place with a fine-tooth comb. There must be something here to indicate where those death threats came from,” said Nymand from the hall, only to fall silent as he stepped into the room.

  “What have we got?” the chief superintendent asked immediately.

  “It looks like there’s been a child here,” the officer replied.

  “It was Carl Emil all along,” said Louise, aghast, carefully picking up Isabella’s dancing shoes from the bag. She put them down on the floor and smoothed the little dress. “He’s been keeping her hidden here.”

  She turned around in shock and looked up at them.

  “He’s dead, but where is she?”

  * * *

  Leaving had been hard. After he came home following his excursion to Carl Emil’s apartment he had taken a bath and changed into a pressed shirt and trousers before applying a dressing to his injured hand.

  Sinking her teeth into him like that had been her big mistake.

  Now he had packed a bag with only the most necessary items and gone down into the cellar to bid them farewell.

  Saying good-bye had not been easy, but he knew there was no other option. The four women in his life were now a chapter in his past. A very costly chapter, certainly, but what did that matter now? Next time he would throw his passion into something even more exotic.

  Uniqueness cost money and he would always look back on these exquisite female bodies with exquisite satisfaction. If only he had been able, like other artists, to share the beauty of his creations with an audience. Such opportunity, however, had never been available to him, he told himself as he sat in the car on his way across Zealand. Several popular exhibitions had toured the world presenting the human body in all its intricate detail and yet none could boast anything like the perfection of his own collection.

  But they had always been for his eyes only and he found this to be another strength, raising his achievement still further in his estimation. He had always felt this to be true, though naturally it rankled somewhat that he would never harvest even the smallest recognition for his consummate works of art.

  His first thought had been to burn the house down and vanish, leaving nothing behind. It would have been an easy matter with all the flammables he kept stored in the cellar. But he knew he was unable to go through with it. He could never bring himself to destroy what had meant so much to him and brought him so much joy and pleasure. Therefore he had decided instead to leave the women as they were. Maybe then the world might yet discover what he had created.

  Vain? Perhaps. But he had come to the conclusion that he had nothing to lose by letting them stay where they were. He had moved on. And as ever, it was best not to look back.

  Moreover, he had realized there was nothing else he could do but sell the Angel of Death, and his contact in New York had made arrangements for him to meet up with his buyer in a small town not far from Hamburg. With the icon in the car and the police on his tail he had no desire to spend any more time on the road than was necessary.

  His contact had also confirmed that he would receive a down payment of five million euros in cash on delivery of the icon. The rest of the sum would be deposited in a closed account in New York, to be transferred to his own account in Luxembourg as soon as the buyer had taken receipt of the artifact.

  It was all sealed.

  He had never asked for it all to turn out the way it had. He had hoped to be able to keep the icon in his cellar. To begin with, the fact that circumstance had forced him to leave the house behind had felt like failure. Now he chose to think of it as a new start. With the proceeds from the icon’s sale he would be able to purchase his own private island. From there, the possibilities were endless.

  He looked forward to this new beginning with almost childlike excitement, serenely confident that the next chapter in his life would be quite as fulfilling as the last. From that perspective, things had turned out rather well indeed.

  Now he would devote himself to purchasing his very own paradise where he could do whatever he wanted and nothing would need to be concealed.

  The thought of the little girl passed fleetingly through his mind. She had been quite a handful. Had she been better behaved he might not have been forced to tie her up, and bolting the hatch might easily have been sufficient. But now it was done.

  Besides, it was best that way. No one would look for her down there. And they would find her only if he required them to.

  36

  We’ve found her,” said Rønholt. It was Thursday morning and Louise was standing in the doorway of the Homicide Department’s little kitchen.

  “Isabella?” she replied incredulously, putting the coffee jug down on the counter.

  “No,” Rønholt replied apologetically, as if he had momentarily forgotten the case that still occupied all Louise’s waking hours. “No, Naja Holten.”

  “Is she dead?”

  Louise stepped into the lunchroom and pulled out a chair.

  “As good as,” he answered. “She’s been admitted to the Rigshospitalet in a coma following a serious car accident yesterday on the Storebæltsbroen.”

  “Does that mean she wasn’t missing after all?” Louise exclaimed in surprise and thought immediately of Grete Milling. She had yet to speak to Melvin and had no idea if Rønholt had managed to get hold of Jeanette’s mother the day before.

  After she had gotten home late in the night she had looked in on Jonas, who lay sleeping with a dressing on his gashed eyebrow, but she had not had the chance to speak to him, and she wasn’t sure whether her downstairs neighbor had managed to have a word with him, either.

  Not until this morning had she been able to ask him about the fight. Initially he had not been willing to talk about it. But then after a short pause it had all come out. He told her that some boys in the class were constantly on his back and acknowledged readily that he had been the one who had started the fight. But she had been unable to coax him into telling her why they were picking on him or what it was they were saying.

  “I’m afraid we’re dealing with a very serious incident indeed,” Rønholt went on. “Without the accident we might never have found her at all.”

  “Was she thrown from the vehicle?”

  “No, she was in the trunk. The rescue unit only discovered her when the truck came to collect the wreck.”

  “In the trunk?”

  “The doctors say it looks like a failed murder. She’d been poisoned, but whoever did it must have underestimated the dosage. To my mind it was only down to error that she was still alive when the car crashed. She was wrapped up in a carpet, so tightly she ought by rights to have suffocated. Everything seems to indicate her assailant thought she was already dead.”

  “Is she going to pull through?”

  “Hard to say. The dr
iver was killed on the spot. The car was Spanish registration and all he had on him was a Spanish driver’s license and a wad of euros, no other documents at all.”

  “What about the driver’s license?”

  “False, of course,” Rønholt replied. “The rescue unit found a cell phone under the passenger seat, though.”

  “And?”

  “There was a Danish number in the list of calls. We can see he was in contact with that number even as the accident happened.”

  “Have you done a trace?”

  “The number belongs to one Miklos Wedersøe of Sankt Jørgensbjerg, Roskilde.”

  “The attorney!” Louise burst out in astonishment. “Have you spoken to him?”

  “He wasn’t in, and his car was gone, too,” Rønholt replied. “I wanted to ask you if were in touch with Wedersøe at any point yesterday?”

  “No,” said Louise. “Nymand’s people stopped by his address last night to inform him about the hotel killing. He wasn’t in then, either.”

  37

  We need to check this attorney from A to Z,” Willumsen said as soon as the Homicide Department had been asked to assist on the case. “And Rebekka Sachs-Smith is going to start talking. Now.”

  Louise nodded and glanced at her colleagues. Michael Stig sat restlessly drumming a pen against his knee. Toft had already raised a hand more than once to get him to stop, but two seconds later he was at it again.

  To give her some credit, Rebekka Sachs-Smith had already talked, at least up to a point, having told them about how her brother and their attorney had been planning to sell the Angel of Death to a buyer in the United States.

  The mood was tense and Willumsen had barked into the corridor to call them all together, as he did only when there was a breakthrough in a case or some poor soul had been picked out for a public reprimand. His forehead glistened and he seemed altogether a lot more agitated than usual. His face looked like he was on fire.

  “Wedersøe was the last person to be in touch with the deceased,” he began, and for a moment Louise was confused. Was he talking about the Spanish car driver now?

  “The printouts from Carl Emil Sachs-Smith’s phone have just come in,” he went on. “The two of them, he and Wedersøe, were texting each other while Carl Emil was at the Prindsen.”

  Louise couldn’t get her head around this at all. What had Wedersøe been up to?

  “More to the point, however, Nymand just finished up going through the hotel’s CCTV. Guess who left the Nordic wing at eight nineteen?” he said, modulating his voice into a flourish as beads of sweat trickled from his temple.

  No one said a word, just sat there gaping at him as he perspired. Louise wasn’t listening.

  Willumsen continued: “Miklos Wedersøe. Captured on film leaving the elevator while lugging a large, unwieldy object wrapped up in a sheet.”

  “The icon?” Michael Stig offered with a hint of triumph, for a moment putting his infernal drumming on hold.

  Willumsen nodded and wiped the back of his hand across his brow.

  “That certainly has to be our assumption,” the head of investigation replied, now getting up from his chair.

  Louise offered to open a window, but Willumsen dismissed the suggestion with a wave of irritation.

  “Police in Roskilde are taking care of the scene and interviewing witnesses. We’ve got the attorney on camera, but I want forensic evidence that he was in that room. Who wants to go out to Wedersøe’s house?”

  Willumsen glanced from Louise and Lars Jørgensen to Michael Stig.

  “I’ll go,” said Stig, finally putting his pen down, only to be brushed aside.

  “No,” said Willumsen, deciding the matter himself and pointing to Lars Jørgensen. “You and Rick,” he said. “Seeing as you’re here today. Or maybe you’re clocking out early?”

  Lars Jørgensen sighed. “I’m here and working,” he said.

  Louise frowned and sent Willumsen a glare. He still had difficulty comprehending that Lars Jørgensen worked reduced hours. To begin with, the superintendent had been so offensive toward him that Louise’s work partner had burned out from stress and had to go off sick. However, due to a lack of resources in the department Willumsen had grudgingly accepted the situation, and now the part-time arrangement was fully integrated into their schedules.

  “You’re on the autopsy,” Willumsen said firmly, with a nod in the direction of Michael Stig.

  38

  Less than an hour later, Louise and Lars Jørgensen passed through the narrow streets of Roskilde’s Sankt Jørgensbjerg district. Jørgensen was behind the wheel while she sat in the passenger seat keeping an eye on the house numbers as they passed a row of low, half-timbered homes.

  Naja Holten had still not woken up from her coma. Rønholt had just checked with the Rigshospitalet, but it was evident that she had been the victim of a very serious assault and the consultant doctor from intensive care thought it a miracle she was still alive. At the moment, they were waiting for the results of their tests. Apparently it was too early to say whether she had suffered brain damage from the poison, so Rønholt had no idea if he would even be able to question her once she woke up. If she woke up, Louise thought to herself.

  “Next one down,” she said, pointing to a white detached residence set back from the road with a small garden out front.

  First, they had stopped off at Wedersøe’s office in the town center, only to be told no one had been informed he was going to be absent. His secretary was at a loss to explain why he had not turned up. It seemed it wasn’t like him at all to miss his appointments.

  “Turn up the driveway,” Louise instructed, thinking it best to park out of the way. There was no sign of the big Mercedes she had seen at Rebekka Sachs-Smith’s house the day before.

  The weather had turned cold and her breath frosted in the air as they got out of the car. She went up to the white-painted front door and rang the bell, waited a second, then rang it again. When no one came, she knocked a couple of times for good measure with the heavy brass knocker, which was cast in the shape of a lion’s head and positioned beneath a small, diamond-shaped window.

  Lars Jørgensen stepped over a row of shrubbery and peered in through a window.

  “Were there any other Danish numbers in our Spanish guy’s contacts?” he asked, moving on to the next window.

  “No, only Wedersøe’s. The rest were Spanish, but the Search Department is trying to identify the driver through Interpol. His photo and dental records have already been sent down to the Spanish police. The car was hired in Málaga.”

  “What were they doing, I wonder.”

  Louise gave a shrug and rang the bell again.

  “There’s no one here,” Jørgensen said, returning after having looked in through the last of the windows at the front of the house.

  “Flemming Larsen examined Naja Holten this morning and he thinks she could have been in the trunk of that car all the way from the Costa del Sol. His assessment was that it was only because she was unconscious that she survived so long. There probably wouldn’t have been enough oxygen if she’d been breathing normally,” he told her, gesturing for her to follow him as he walked on.

  They went around the side of the house and peered into the kitchen.

  “Nothing here, either,” he noted and buried his hands in his pockets. February’s cold nipped at their cheeks. Louise shivered.

  It was 11 a.m. and there had been no sign of life from the attorney since the day before. Louise called Rebekka Sachs-Smith to hear if she had been in touch with Wedersøe since Louise had left her house. Rebekka had not been informed about Naja Holten, so Louise inquired only if she might have an idea as to Wedersøe’s whereabouts.

  “She’s gone,” said Rebekka, obviously not caring about the family attorney. “My daughter’s no longer in the place she was being held.”

  Her voice was at once shrill and fatigued, as if it were only being kept together by the anxiety and fear that were so plain
in her tone.

  “What makes you say that?” Louise probed, her eyes watching Lars Jørgensen as he tried the cellar door then gave up with a shake of his head.

  “Mona says so. She rang Nymand and told him my daughter was closer than we imagined. But now she’s gone.”

  Rebekka spoke quickly and with insistence, and Louise could hear Marybeth going about her work in the background.

  “Mona had no way of knowing it was my brother who’d taken her,” she went on.

  When they had informed Rebekka that her daughter had been with her brother ever since she disappeared, she had at first reacted with anger, berating the police for casting aspersions on their family. Eventually she had run out of steam and gone quiet again, shutting out everything and not wishing to hear another word.

  “Who’s Mona?” Louise asked and was given a story about a psychiatric patient at Sankt Hans who had on several previous occasions proved helpful to police in locating missing persons.

  “There was an article about her in the Roskilde Dagblad; you can look it up,” Rebekka told her.

  Louise had more than a little difficulty imagining Nymand swallowing such a story, but it was just the kind of thing the media reveled in.

  “A psychic, you mean?” Louise replied dismissively. They had found out for themselves how close the girl had been to them when they discovered she had been held in her uncle’s apartment. How this Mona woman could have known about it, however, she was unable to say, since nothing had been given out to the press.

  “She says Isabella’s afraid. It’s dark and cold where she is. You can see the place when you stand under the big arch.”

  Sure, Louise thought. Attention-seeking tea-leaf readers generally seemed to have no scruples about preying on a mother’s fear as long as it meant they could grab some limelight for themselves.