Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  Camilla made do with a nod.

  “Good,” the funeral director finally said. “So, I’m going to assume you don’t have a burial permit or a deed to a burial plot?”

  “Correct,” Camilla said tersely. “I don’t think he was prepared to have someone slit his neck just then.”

  Louise turned and gave her a look.

  The man behind the desk let her remark slide once again and instead walked over to the wall where the urns were displayed.

  “Have you had a chance to think about which urn you’re interested in?”

  Camilla took a step back to look at the selection.

  “It doesn’t need to be anything special,” she said. “A standard one, if there’s such a thing.”

  The funeral director raised his eyebrow for a second and looked at Camilla.

  “There isn’t. But you can certainly get one without too many frills,” he said, pointing up at a black vessel with a flat lid. The tag underneath said, “Simple.” Next to that there was a “Simple Exclusive,” and then the rest of them became progressively more ornate.

  Camilla pointed to the no-frills urn and asked whether everything could be arranged in time for the funeral on Saturday.

  “We have the pastor scheduled for 1 P.M.,” she said.

  The funeral director nodded; he was obviously interested in wrapping up his business with Camilla Lind as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  27

  THE AFTERNOON SUN SHONE FROM A SPRING SKY PRACTICALLY devoid of clouds, and they were lucky that the Belis Bar had a free table outside on the square in front of Frederiksberg Town Hall.

  Louise ordered two beers in the hopes that maybe that would help them shake off the funereal mood a little, and as she took her first sip she realized she didn’t feel the least bit guilty about letting her partner hold the fort alone down on Valdemarsgade. At the morning briefing, Willumsen had made it clear that he didn’t think there was any reason to keep an eye on Miloš Vituk and the Czech girls anymore, but Suhr hadn’t agreed. So they had decided to continue the surveillance at least for the rest of the day.

  The only thing they’d noted so far was that Pavlína had brought a guest home with her—a young woman about the same age who had a bouquet of flowers that Louise figured were for Hana.

  Louise watched Camilla sip at the thick foam at the top of her beer. She was worried about Camilla, but not as much as she had been the first couple of days after the murder. Camilla’s chat with the crisis psychologist had apparently allowed her to acknowledge that some things were out of her control, even if she might have helped trigger them herself. Camilla was still weighed down with self-recrimination and guilt, but right now at least she was planning on using her leave of absence to reevaluate her goals in life and the steps she needed to take to achieve them.

  “Right now I don’t have the slightest desire to go back to the paper,” she admitted when Louise asked what she was thinking.

  “What do you want to do, then?” Louise asked, holding her beer in her hands as she tilted her head back, enjoying the sunlight.

  “I don’t know,” Camilla said after a pause. “I might start writing books.” Louise smiled. What journalist wouldn’t want to do that?

  “Well, I recommend you write a murder mystery and become world-famous—then you’ll be rolling in money,” Louise said with her eyes closed, the warmth spreading from her face to the rest of her body. “Plus it’ll get you away from Morgenavisen.”

  She heard Camilla scoot her chair slightly, but she didn’t say anything for quite a while.

  “Maybe. But first I want to have a baby.”

  This news was so abrupt that Louise opened her eyes and gaped at her friend, who was watching a young mother pushing a stroller down the sidewalk in front of them.

  Louise leaned over the table and set down her beer.

  “You have a child,” she reminded Camilla, who was watching the stroller with a serious expression, which confused Louise.

  “I’ve always dreamed of having a whole bunch of kids, actually. And ever since I had Markus, I’ve known that I wanted one or two more, but nothing ever became of it. So, I’ve decided to do something about that dream so I won’t have to look back and regret not even having tried.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Camilla. You have plenty of time—you’re only thirty-eight! You make it sound like you’re closer to fifty. But you’re also going to have to find the guy you want to have these kids with. Children are still something people dream about having together, usually.”

  Louise hadn’t intended to sound quite so scolding, but Camilla picked up on it right away.

  “Why do you always get so uptight whenever kids come up?” Camilla asked, irritated. “You’re so down on kids.”

  “Oh, come on. That’s ridiculous. But you already have Markus, after all, and he’s the best. Besides, I guess I think people sound spoiled when they say their ‘whole life’ is a failure just because they haven’t had the number of children they wanted.”

  Camilla took a swig of beer and looked at Louise, who vaguely suspected that the abandoned baby from the church had put this notion in her friend’s head.

  “I don’t understand how you can be so negative when you don’t even know what you’re missing,” Camilla said. “It’s not like you haven’t had a chance to have kids, either. If it’d been up to Peter, you’d have five by now. I think you’re running the risk yourself of waking up one day and realizing it’s too late.”

  Louise felt the emotion before it showed in her eyes. She went completely cold inside. Here she’d been thinking they would spend a couple of pleasant hours together, Camilla would be able to get things off her chest, and maybe that would help her relax about all her inner turmoil. Instead, the conversation had wound up here—where there was no comfortable way out.

  She sat up straight and tried to sound more upbeat than the cutting remarks that were otherwise on the tip of her tongue.

  “I came to terms a long time ago with the fact that I don’t think having kids is a right,” she said. “Some people have kids, some don’t. It’s not something you can expect. Or an indicator of your life’s success. You know I don’t go around wishing my life was different than it is, and it’s just turned out that my life doesn’t include kids. But that doesn’t make it a bad life.”

  Louise leaned back, realizing that her voice was sounding defensive despite her best efforts.

  “I don’t mean to nag you,” Camilla said, trying to calm Louise down. “But it’s different for me. I’m not sure I have time to wait for the right person to come along, so I’m considering artificial insemination.”

  Louise was speechless as she shook her head.

  “As long as you don’t make the government pay for it, well, good luck. I’ll take care of Markus when you’re breastfeeding.”

  Louise got up to pay. She was sad that the mood had been ruined. What bugged her the most, really, was that children had become a criterion for a successful life, and who cared whether they were born out of love as long as you had them. If that was it, she’d rather be free. She remembered an old case where she visited a fortuneteller, who in all seriousness told her that a child’s soul chose the mother it wanted before it was born. Personally, Louise was just fine with the fact that no child’s soul had picked her.

  Camilla and Louise walked across the square to Falkoner Allé in silence.

  “I can tell you’ve already made up your mind,” Louise said before they said good-bye.

  Camilla nodded. “You know how I feel about people who talk up a storm about all the things they want but never step up and make it reality. If I’m going to criticize other people for all their empty talk, well then I’d better fucking step up and do something about my own life. Otherwise I ought to just shut up,” Camilla said.

  Louise smiled.

  “Well, I know you well enough to be fairly sure this shutting-up phase won’t last long,” Louise said before giving Camilla a q
uick kiss on the cheek in farewell and hurrying across the street when the light turned green.

  On the other side she stopped and watched as Camilla’s back disappeared toward Falkoner Center.

  28

  “THIS IS GOING TO TAKE FUCKING MONTHS,” WILLUMSEN SAID, irritatedly brushing cake crumbs off the papers on the table in front of him. The team was meeting around the conference table on Friday afternoon before heading home for the weekend, and Willumsen was glaring at Stig, who had just said they still didn’t have enough on the Albanians to take action.

  “Obviously we can haul them in for questioning and check their alibis, but that would make it pretty obvious that we’ve been watching them, and we still don’t have enough to hold them,” Stig continued. “We’re going to have to wait until we have more. We just haven’t gotten much out of the last couple of days of surveillance. We don’t have any witnesses to the two murders, and after what happened to Kaj Antonsen, we shouldn’t expect people to suddenly feel like talking to us either. Instead, let’s keep watching and gathering info. It’s really not enough that they drive a car that’s identical to the one that was seen on Skelbækgade the same evening that prostitute’s throat was slit, or at the harbor for that matter. And we have nothing at all to tie the Albanians to the location where Antonsen was killed.”

  “Yeah, which is exactly why we need to find out where they were when all that happened,” Willumsen growled, staring at Stig until he eventually looked away. “You’ve been following them. What have we gotten out of that?”

  Toft set a stack of pictures on the table. They were all taken in the last couple of days and showed the Eastern European women on and around Istedgade. There were pictures of the prostitutes standing on the sidewalk with different men, walking into Club Intim with their johns, and leaning over to talk into rolled-down windows of cars.

  “Things really pick up around closing time,” Stig commented as he explained that he had accompanied the photographer. “And then there’s another rush after dinner and kind of steady traffic until a good while past midnight, depending on the weather.”

  “Did you see any Roma women or girls?” Toft asked, pulling a menthol cartridge for his plastic cigarette out of his shirt pocket under his sweater. “Some of the girls on the street aren’t much more than thirteen or fourteen, and I’ve heard their families are the ones who send them to Denmark in the first place.” Louise realized that Toft’s own granddaughter, Ida, was just that age.

  “The group on the streets right now apparently arrived a few months ago. They have to earn money for the grand houses their fathers are building. According to one of the girls down at The Nest, the girls were sent to Italy first but couldn’t earn enough there. So they were sent up here, and now they’re hanging out down at Halmtorvet in front of the convention center.”

  Louise recalled the Roma girls as she absentmindedly reached for the plastic mug in front of her. If someone didn’t know any better, they’d have no idea the girls were actually for sale. They looked like any other teenagers in their loose white low-waisted pants and tight tops. Grinning and goofing around, they stood in a little cluster waiting for the next customer to stop and flash his lights. One of them was wearing a headband and was nothing more than a child.

  Louise tried to focus and put the Roma girls out of her mind.

  “What do we know about the girls you saw the Albanians collecting money from?” Willumsen asked.

  Toft, who was visibly moved by the sad fates of these girls, said they were being put up in a number of cheap hotels.

  “They can get a room for 5,000 kroner a month, and then of course there’s no telling how many people they cram into one room.”

  “We need to get these girls to talk,” Willumsen decided, poking a couple of the pictures with his finger.

  Mikkelsen was still for a moment before he finally nodded.

  “We could arrest them,” Mikkelsen began. “But prostitution isn’t illegal per se, so we can nab them only for working without a valid work permit and smack a 500-kroner fine on them. And in cases like this, you need to have all your evidence spic and span, otherwise the courts won’t have it. You can be sure, if we ask the women if they were being forced to prostitute themselves, that they will most definitely say no—not because they don’t want us to help them, but because they dare not say otherwise. They don’t get a simple scolding if they don’t do what their pimps say, after all; the pimps break them down psychologically with threats of retaliation against their families back home. They’ll kill their parents, burn down their houses, rape and sell their sisters. That kind of thing creates such a deep-seated fear that the girls choose to keep quiet and just obey the pimps, no matter what. And if we go to the pimps, they’ll just claim they don’t know a thing about extortion or human trafficking. They’ll say the women are turning tricks because they want to. So I agree we need a little more,” he finally concluded with an eye on the throbbing blood vessel on Willumsen’s temple.

  “We could also drag things out so long that they have time to really ramp up their business,” Willumsen said testily. “Then they’ll have a chance to abuse even more of their girls because no one is intervening.”

  Toft pulled the plastic cigarette out of his mouth and rolled it back and forth between his fingers but stayed out of Willumsen’s vortex. Experience had taught him that he would get farthest by dropping the subject now and waiting to bring it up again later when Willumsen’s blood vessels weren’t throbbing quite so obviously.

  “When we investigate human-trafficking and prostitution cases like this, the outcome always depends on how patient we can be,” Mikkelsen said, leaning forward, ignoring Willumsen’s tone. “I think we’d be wise to spend some time developing an overview and tying all the pieces of the case together before making our move.”

  Mikkelsen spoke calmly and rationally, and Louise watched Willumsen’s blood vessels continue throbbing. Willumsen’s active vocabulary lacked words like “patience” or “overview.” And yet, he seemed like he might be buying it this time. At any rate, his face grew less gruff, he nodded a couple of times, and for the time being at least he stopped interrupting with comments. Instead, he changed the topic by pulling a couple of photos out of the stack and sliding them out into the middle of the table.

  “Overview,” he repeated, dwelling on the feel of the word in his mouth, as he pointed to one of the pictures. “That’s what we’ll do then. But take a look at this, will you, and tell me what our friends are up to.”

  The picture showed a small group of men, standing around a bench on Strøget, the famous pedestrian shopping street in the heart of Copenhagen. They were concentrating on something, but it was hard to see what. Arian was standing behind them. There were also pictures of money changing hands. Hamdi was in only a couple of the photos.

  “The matchstick game,” Stig said, and then Mikkelsen explained:

  “It’s a ‘dexterity game’ fairly common among Albanians—and it’s not for small potatoes. They might make up to 4,000 or 5,000 kroner a day.”

  Willumsen nodded as Mikkelsen explained that the police went after these games regularly.

  “They are damn good with their hands. You have to guess which box the matchstick is under. Usually what happens is that the group gathers in a little crowd. One of them runs the game, while a couple of them keep an eye out for police, and then there’s one or two who pretend they’re lucky winners. Then when some random person passing by stops to try his or her luck, the fraud begins. It’s all sleight of hand, and there’s basically no chance of winning,” he said, adding that the downtown precinct regularly charged people with disturbing the peace or gathering without a permit. After a couple of those, they were usually banned from hanging out on Strøget at all. “But I don’t know how much that impedes them, really, and it’s certainly possible that they also use the distraction of the game to pick some pockets.”

  “I suppose Arian and Hamdi organize the games and then give th
e guys who run the games a little cut for doing the work,” Louise guessed, pointing out that both of the Albanians were welfare recipients. “Arian came to Denmark in 1997 when he was granted asylum and then a residence permit. He’s thirty-one and lives alone in his apartment out in Valby. It’s subsidized public housing. In addition to that, he receives 1,800 kroner a month in welfare benefits.”

  “Well, he must be doing quite well since he can afford to buy an Audi A4!” Stig exclaimed with poorly concealed jealousy.

  “Exactly,” Louise said, noting that a few con games couldn’t be financing his lifestyle. “Hamdi arrived in Denmark the following year. He’s twenty-six and also has a permanent residence permit. He lives in a fairly large one-bedroom apartment on Vesterbrogade and gets the same benefit check each month.”

  Willumsen nodded with his hands folded under his chin contemplatively. The room suddenly turned quiet, and everyone tried picturing the possible scenarios and figuring out what their next move should be.

  “Is anyone out on Valdemarsgade watching Miloš and the girls right now?” Willumsen finally asked, breaking the silence.

  Lars sat up a little straighter.

  “The girls went out with a female friend in the late afternoon,” he reported. “The friend picked them up at Miloš’s apartment. He didn’t leave the apartment until later in the evening when he met a male friend at a bar on Victoriagade.”

  “But he was already back home an hour after that, and I talked to him on the phone for a bit,” said Louise, who had been watching the building from the doorway across the street. “It sounds like the girls have calmed back down again, and there haven’t been any signs of commotion since the episode with Hana. No one has contacted them, and they said they didn’t feel watched. Now their plan is for Hana to move to the friend’s place tomorrow—the friend who came to visit. She apparently has a guest room. I understood from Miloš that the apartment was feeling a little too crowded, given Hana’s long-term stay.”