Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  Maja Lang and a very young girl that Lars had spoken to out in Glostrup were the only ones for whom things had not gone the way they should have. The young woman had had an acute abortion as the result of a serious traffic accident she had been involved in a month earlier. When Lars visited her, she had just returned home from the hospital and assumed that was why the maternity clinic still hadn’t been informed of what had happened.

  Louise glanced over at the door in irritation when someone knocked three times, hard, and was about to ask whoever it was to go away and let her work when Toft came in and said he’d just received an e-mail from Jana Romanová.

  “She’s a detective at Bartolomějská Street, which is Prague’s ‘hard’ police precinct,” he explained, closing the door behind him. “She confirmed that last week Monday they found Ilana Procházková in an apartment just behind Václavská Street, where a lot of the city’s prostitution takes place.”

  Louise reached for the half-empty roll of chocolate cookies and offered Toft one before she helped herself and pushed them across the desk to Lars.

  “Okay,” she said, feeling the little hairs on her arm stand up.

  “True enough, her throat had been slit. Jana’s going to have the most important details from the pathology report and the crime scene investigation results translated into English and promised to e-mail them ASAP.”

  Louise rested her head in her hands. This was starting to feel like a Sudoku, where someone had switched all the numbers around.

  “Did you ask what she knew about the Serb?” Lars asked out of curiosity, taking a bite of his cookie.

  Toft got a deep wrinkle in his forehead and nodded pensively.

  “Yeaaah. She’s guessing the guy they’re referring to is named Bosko. They know him from the prostitution scene, but she hadn’t heard that he had allegedly been seen in the area. They did have a couple of witness statements that said that a man with short hair and a leather jacket had been seen in the building, but he hadn’t been identified yet.”

  “What else was she able to tell you about him?” Louise asked, taking another cookie. “I mean, it certainly sounds like she knows who he is.”

  “Nothing else. She seemed a little reticent about him, but maybe that’s because she wants to look into him first and see if there’s a connection. They’re working on finding a match for the fingerprints they found in the apartment and in the stairwell right now. The results aren’t back yet. And she said there was a lot of blood around the body, which means that the jugular was severed and sprayed, and the murderer must have had a fair amount of blood on him when he left the scene. And that doesn’t match the description of the man witnesses saw leaving the building around the time of the murder.”

  “Well, then, I guess you’re going to have to get ahold of Arian and Hamdi and get them to tell you more,” Louise said. “If they think there’s a connection, and if they want to get out from under the cloud of suspicion.”

  “They’re being picked up right now,” Toft nodded and said that Mikkelsen and Stig were going to question the two Albanians. He would stay in touch with Jana, so they could compare the technical findings from Prague with what they’d found at the murder locations in Copenhagen to help determine if the cases were connected.

  “That’s good, because that will let them know that Camilla held up her end of the agreement,” Louise said after Toft had shut the door behind him.

  Willumsen had asked them to turn in a report to him once they had finished going through the list.

  Willumsen nodded toward the conference table when they knocked, and quickly gathered up the papers that were spread out in a little heap in front of him.

  “Was there anything suspicious?”

  He stood up and came over to sit down across from them.

  “Unfortunately not,” Lars said. “But I suppose it would have been awfully lucky if it had been that easy.”

  The lead detective nodded and rubbed his chin, as he thought about it. “Let’s just compare with what Bellahøj found in their search for Baby Girl’s mother,” he said, and added that it would surely take a couple more days—or maybe a week—before the boy’s DNA came back.

  “So I guess there’s no way around it. We’re going to have to appeal to the public and ask people to come forward if they noticed a woman walking around with a big belly but without a baby carriage since then. Obviously we run the risk of offending someone by assuming that she might have been pregnant if she turns out to have only gotten a little fat, but that’s a risk we’ll just have to take,” he said, looking as if it wouldn’t bother him in the least to hurl an insult like that.

  The lead detective got up and walked over to the stack of papers, which he hadn’t had a chance to look at yet.

  “Do the techs have anything on the towel he was wrapped in?” she asked, looking at Willumsen.

  He shook his head absentmindedly as he flipped through the pages.

  “Yes, here!” he exclaimed when he was almost through. “But all it says is that they can tell from the brand that it was made for the Føtex chain.”

  “That’s the same type of towel Baby Girl was left in,” Louise said with start. “And the same color,” she added with a level of enthusiasm that made Willumsen look at her eagerly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “A hundred percent! A dark-blue terry cloth towel from Føtex. That’s pretty damn interesting, wouldn’t you say? There’s no way that’s just a coincidence.”

  Willumsen didn’t say anything, but she could tell he was inclined to agree with her.

  “We’ll have the two towels compared for prints and DNA,” he decided, and walked back over to his desk and went to pick up his phone. “Oh, and Bellahøj picked up those two lovebirds with the green Fiat. Sure enough, they were in the cemetery from about 4 A.M. until about 6 or 6:30, but they didn’t see or hear anything. People get turned on by the weirdest things these days,” he said, and then started dialing Frandsen’s number.

  42

  IT WAS PAST 6:00 WHEN CAMILLA AND MARKUS RAN ACROSS THE courtyard in front of the pastor’s residence. Markus was carrying the wine and the big bottle of soda, and Camilla was carrying the two bags from Meyer’s Deli. They were supposed to be there at six, but they’d had to wait in line to get the takeout, so the time had gotten away from them.

  She stopped in surprise when she spotted the black women’s bicycle with a basket on the handlebars, which was parked at the base of the kitchen stairs. The kitchen door was slightly ajar.

  “Just a sec,” she called to Markus, who was already on the first step. “Maybe we ought to go to the front door if he has guests.”

  Markus looked from his mother to the bicycle, not understanding what she meant.

  “That’s just the girl’s,” he said. “Jonas said she was going to do some cleaning and stuff.”

  Camilla looked at him in astonishment.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me at school. She started yesterday.”

  They walked up and used the knocker.

  “Come in.”

  Henrik Holm took the bags and put them on the kitchen table.

  Markus instantly disappeared upstairs, even though Camilla called after him that they were about to eat.

  “How are you doing?” the pastor asked, looking at her with concern.

  He really didn’t need to ask, because it was perfectly obvious to anyone who looked that things were falling apart. She had finally worked up the energy to take a bath before Markus came home from school, and she’d also found some clean clothes in the very back of her closet, but she hadn’t done much else. All the same, she appreciated his concern. Someone ought to be showing some for him, too. It occurred to her that his cheeks looked more hollow and his skin more ashen than when she’d last seen him, but she certainly hadn’t been paying that much attention on Saturday that she would have noticed if the changes had already started by then.

  She accepted the glass of
wine he handed her.

  “Markus says you have a housekeeper,” she said, nodding toward the open kitchen door, where the bike was parked.

  He seemed embarrassed and turned around to take the food out of the bags.

  “Yeah,” he said with his back to her. “After everything that’s happened in the last few weeks, I suddenly felt like it would be nice to have a little help on that front.”

  Camilla walked over and started to get out the plates.

  “I can certainly understand that,” she said, walking over to get the salad Henrik had made. “I could use a little help myself to make it through the day, you know, just from first thing in the morning until it’s time for me to go to bed again.”

  Henrik smiled at her and refilled their wine glasses, without her really having noticed that she’d emptied hers.

  “How often is she coming? Once or twice a week?” Camilla asked, trying to concentrate on tasting the wine instead of just chugging it down.

  “I’ve taken her in as an au-pair, so she’s living here. Three months to start with. I’ll see if I can get used to that, and hopefully by then things will have settled down again in our lives. Right now, I’m being bombarded with messages from the parish council and parishioners who want to know what’s going on.”

  Camilla nodded and put the plates out on the table.

  “Plus maybe this way I’ll be able to spend a little more quality time with Jonas,” he added with a little smile, as if he felt like he needed to find excuses to justify finally having accepted a little help.

  Camilla nodded and abruptly turned toward the door to the living room, where she’d heard the sound of a woman’s voice. A tall young woman walked into the room with her cell phone to her ear and her eyes on the floor, as if she were concentrating on the phone call and hadn’t noticed that they were looking at her.

  Camilla recognized the dark pageboy hair and the dark eye makeup right away.

  “Well, it looks like it ended up working out very nicely,” Camilla said and greeted the woman, who smiled at them uncertainly before leaving the room again.

  Henrik nodded and said that some things worked out on their own. He stopped Camilla when she offered to set another place, and explained that Tereza didn’t eat with them.

  “There’s a little mother-in-law apartment in the attic,” he explained, pointing toward the staircase. “It has its own bathroom and a little kitchenette, so she prefers to eat on her own,” he explained.

  I suppose that makes sense, Camilla thought. It probably suited Henrik best, too, that he and Jonas could continue to do things the way they usually did without having to involve a stranger.

  “Boys!” Camilla yelled up the stairs, hoping that would be enough to get their attention.

  “Would you rather have coffee or tea?” Henrik asked once they’d cleared the table. “I’ve given up drinking coffee in the evenings lately. It’s no good to have it interfering with my sleep.”

  There was still more wine in the bottle, so Camilla said she would stick to that.

  “Have you had any thoughts about what we ought to do in terms of the funeral?” Henrik asked after sitting down across from her with a cup of tea in front of him. “I have it tentatively scheduled for Saturday.”

  If she had been thinking about it, that would probably have been her choice. She set her hands on the table and looked at him.

  “I’m going to have to back out and leave it to you, or you can leave it to other people. I can’t do it. It eats away at me night and day and I’m going crazy, so I’ve decided that I’ll have to wait to say my good-byes to him until after he’s in the ground in whatever pauper’s grave somewhere. Someday when the sun is out, like it was today, I’ll go there with a bag full of beer bottles and a ghetto blaster and play ‘Walk the Line’ for him. That’ll be my way of doing it.”

  Henrik’s tired eyes twinkled at her.

  “That’s a good plan,” he conceded, and said he’d be sure to show her where the urn was interred.

  Camilla took a deep breath and then changed the topic.

  “Did you hear that the case from last Saturday has been turned over to the homicide squad?” she asked after she’d poured the last of the wine into her glass.

  He nodded and said that Louise had stopped by.

  “Do you think there could be a connection between the two cases after all, even though the police are investigating them separately?” she asked, swirling her wine around in the glass.

  He shrugged, but then shook his head.

  “Obviously I’ve been thinking about it a lot, but I don’t see what they could have to do with each other,” he said.

  “But it is sick, isn’t it, to abandon a stillborn baby.”

  She studied his face to find a reaction and then looked away when he looked up from his teacup and nodded with a deep furrow in his brow.

  “That’s one of the things that depresses me the most,” he admitted. “Most people have no idea how many mentally ill people are left to their own devices. People who are lonely and unhappy cry out for help countless times, but only a tiny number are ever heard. Only in the most glaring circumstances, when it turns into a shootout with the police or something, where the mentally ill person is doomed to lose from the beginning.”

  “Maybe abandoning the baby last Saturday was an attempt to get you to listen,” Louise said, after a couple moments of silence. She could hear the boys playing World of Warcraft up in Jonas’s room, and based on the cheers, she was guessing one of them had just made it to a new level. “I’m thinking about the thing with the toe,” Camilla said. She waited for his reaction, but when it didn’t come, she continued. “Markus told me that Jonas is also missing a pinky toe.”

  She knew she was overstepping her bounds, trespassing on his privacy, and she watched him to see if he was taking it the wrong way. At first he looked at her in surprise, as if he was shocked that she knew about that detail, but then he looked over toward the bread basket, which was still sitting on the table, and looked lost in thought, in a way that made her not want to bother him.

  “Obviously I’ve thought about that,” he said after a while. “But I don’t see how those two things could be connected. My son has a congenital defect on his foot, which anyone who has seen him barefoot knows about, but otherwise it’s not really something anyone would notice. If someone is trying to tell me something, I really hope they’ll come forward so I can help them.”

  There was a look of resignation on his face, which Camilla interpreted as tiredness. It was a little after 9:00; she ought to be getting home so that Markus wouldn’t be too much of a basket case when he had to get up for school the next morning.

  She smiled when he thanked her for bringing the food, and while he yelled up to the boys that Markus should come down, she got their jackets.

  43

  ON THE WAY DOWN FROM THE CAFETERIA, LOUISE SPOTTED THE interpreter. Igli was on his way to the monitoring room. She overtook a couple of the office girls, who were taking up most of the stairwell, chatting as they walked, and received a snide comment as she squeezed by.

  She jogged to catch up to Igli and asked him if he had time for a cup of coffee. She knew that he’d worked for the police in Belgrade for years before moving to Denmark during the war in the former Yugoslavia.

  He smiled at her in surprise and said that he thought she and Lars had been reassigned and weren’t following the wiretaps that he was working on anymore.

  “True enough,” she hurried to say, as they started heading back up to the cafeteria together.

  “Do you take milk or sugar?” Louise asked as the cashier rung them up.

  “Sugar,” he requested, and added that he wouldn’t mind a pastry to go with the coffee.

  Louise pointed to the two last chocolate chip rolls on the plate and paid before carrying the tray over to the table in the back corner of the room.

  “So, what is it you want?” Igli asked and apologized for having to leave his
cell phone on while they talked because his son was going to call when he left school. “He’s just started taking the bus home by himself,” Igli explained.

  “That’s fine,” Louise said, passing him one of the rolls and mopping up the coffee that had sloshed over onto the saucer. “I want to find out if you know anything about a Serb named Bosko.”

  Igli’s teaspoon stopped stirring for a second as he watched her attentively.

  “That’s really quite a common Serbian name,” he said, and then kept stirring.

  She nodded and thought, I suppose it is.

  “I’m talking about a person who is known to both the Czech police and the two Albanians whose phone calls you’ve been monitoring. Does that tell you anything?”

  A gloomy look slipped over his face and a deep wrinkle formed in his forehead.

  “Well, then, I have an idea who you’re thinking of. Why do you ask about him?” Igli wanted to know, as though she’d asked him to pull out a shadow from the past.

  “Because his name has come up in connection with the Kødbyen case. We don’t know if there’s anything to it, but I’d like to find out who he is.”

  She explained what had happened to Camilla and told Igli about the tip Arian had given them, which had turned out to be true.

  “But when Toft tried to get information from his source with the police in Prague, she just wormed her way out of it and said that they hadn’t heard he was in town. So he was obviously someone they were familiar with.”

  Igli nodded and leaned his head over his full coffee cup before admitting that Bosko was someone who was known throughout most of the Balkans.

  “Personally, it’s been my opinion that it’s best to know as little about him as possible, but if you think you need to know, I’ll be happy to tell you what kind of person he is.”

  Igli pushed the plate with the untouched chocolate chip roll away and leaned in over the table.