Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  Finally he nodded and leaned forward so that his forearms were resting on his knees with his fingers interlaced. He nodded again, but remained silent.

  “It makes us think there might be a personal motive behind the event,” Louise explained, watching his wiry hair flutter a little in the wind as he shook his head.

  “I can’t imagine there is one,” he said, focusing intently on his fingers, which were moving in and out of each other. “I wouldn’t have even given it a thought myself if Camilla hadn’t mentioned it yesterday.” Louise could almost physically feel his reluctance to talk any more about it.

  Finally she was forced to ask, “Are there many people who know about his little defect?”

  The pastor slowly shook his head.

  “Whether there’s any connection or not, I’d like to ask you to make a list of the names of the pregnant women you have had any recent contact with for any reason,” she requested. “And also a list of names of anyone who has already scheduled a baptism or who has at least discussed possibly wanting to baptize a child in your church.”

  She hazarded a guess that having a pastor who was familiar from his media appearances might make people more interested in him.

  “Maybe we should also consider whether you might have written something recently that might have triggered this action,” she concluded.

  Finally he turned to her, and to her surprise she saw a look of profound irritation in his eyes. She jumped slightly when he suddenly got up from the bench.

  “I’m going to need to ask you to respect that as a pastor, I’m bound to keep certain things confidential. But having said that, I don’t need to even think about it to know that there haven’t been any episodes here in the church that could have triggered what you’re thinking of.”

  Louise was about to tone things down a little, but didn’t have a chance to say anything before Henrik continued:

  “If someone wanted to come after me because of the things I write, then I can pretty much promise you it would’ve happened a long time ago. But you’re welcome to go through everything if you think it might have some significance. All my columns and commentaries are on my Web site.”

  She hadn’t meant to make him mad, and she was so surprised at his intense response that she just sat there staring at him as he walked back toward the kitchen door. Then she closed her eyes and turned her face to the sun and composed herself for a second with the back of her head resting against the wall.

  She decided to cut through the cemetery and walked along, lost in her own thoughts, her eyes trained on the gravel, which is why it wasn’t until she’d passed the young girl on the path that it occurred to her that there was something familiar about her. Louise turned around, but then she wasn’t sure it had been Hana. From behind, it was only the long blonde hair that confirmed her guess.

  At the end of the graves, she exited through the gate and crossed the street before continuing on into Frederiksberg Park. When she reached the lake, she stopped abruptly and enjoyed the view of the swans and coots walking along the shore. The mild spring weather reminded her that summer was on its way. Suddenly she felt an almost overwhelming urge to get out of town, to head for the fields and woods and water, and she sat down on the bench closest to the ice cream stand, which wasn’t open for the season yet, and pulled out her phone.

  A quick glance at her watch told her that it was just past four when she sent Mik a text message inviting herself to go kayaking with him on Holbæk Fjord. “If you have the kayaks ready in an hour, I’ll pay for dinner at the harbor when we get back to shore,” she wrote and smiled as she pressed SEND.

  The response came before she’d even had time to get up off the bench.

  “Great. See you soon.”

  46

  MIK RASMUSSEN AND LOUISE OVERSLEPT. SHE’D PLANNED TO leave at about 7:00; now it was almost 8:30. Of course they’d ended up having Irish coffees when they got back to his traditional thatch-roofed farmhouse after they’d eaten soup, monkfish cheeks, and a “sumptuous symphony of chocolate,” as the chef had elegantly dubbed the four different chocolate desserts that had been served together in one square glass dish and dusted with powdered sugar.

  They hadn’t gotten much sleep, but her body felt great and she was humming “Wake up; it’s a wonderful morning” as she backed out of the courtyard and blew him a kiss through the driver’s side window.

  Once she was on the highway she turned on the radio and sang along to “Billie Jean,” glad that P4 still played Michael Jackson even though most people had come to label him as a pedophile freak.

  She stopped in Frederiksberg to park her car and biked the rest of the way in to Police Headquarters. She was still humming as she biked along Gammel Kongevej with her sunglasses on and the wind in her long, dark curls, and out in front of Police Square she spotted Mikkelsen walking down the sidewalk.

  “Hey!” she called, waving to him, before swinging her leg over the saddle of her black mountain bike. “You want to walk up with me?”

  He nodded, breathing a little heavily.

  “Too many cigarettes and not enough exercise,” he admitted.

  Louise was about to add, “And too much barbecue,” but managed to bite her tongue. It really wasn’t any of her business.

  “Are you guys meeting?” she asked Mikkelsen and nodded to the guy at the front desk as she showed her ID.

  “Yeah,” Mikkelsen grunted, still not quite having caught his breath. “We really want to find out where the Albanians are meeting with the girls now when they make their payments. They’re not going to Central Station anymore.”

  “Could they have put their business on hold for a bit?” Louise suggested, but Mikkelsen shook his head, smiling.

  “No. No way,” he said. “That’s the last thing they’d do, even though they know we’re watching them.”

  She gave him a blank look.

  “You have to keep in mind that even if they get caught and charged with pandering or, in a worst-case scenario, trafficking in women, the penalty isn’t that high. Compared to what they make in a single day, it’s not enough to scare them. It’s no skin off their noses if they wind up in the slammer for a year or two, because they’re raking in so much money when things are going well.”

  Louise listened with interest as he continued:

  “Right now, human trafficking is the most lucrative crime. That’s where they get the money to buy weapons and drugs.”

  That last bit was a little dig, justifying why they still ought to take down the people behind the scenes, even if it was only for a year or two.

  Louise stopped outside her office and watched Mikkelsen as he continued two doors down the hallway and knocked on Toft and Stig’s door.

  It was five to ten when she said good morning to Lars, who was facing his screen but watched her as she took off her jacket and turned on her computer.

  “Good morning,” he teased, implying that he’d been working for several hours already and that he no longer really considered it morning.

  “Yeah,” she said apologetically. “I overslept. I should’ve called you when I woke up, but I didn’t think about it.”

  He hurriedly shook his head.

  “You didn’t need to.”

  Suddenly she noticed something in his expression that she hadn’t seen before.

  Louise sat down and looked at him.

  “Were you afraid something had happened to me?”

  His eyes were back on his computer, but after a second he nodded and admitted that the thought had crossed his mind.

  She smiled.

  “You were worried about me,” she said, and he looked embarrassed.

  He mumbled something about given what had happened to Camilla, it didn’t hurt to pay a little extra attention.…

  “You shouldn’t be apologizing. I’m just glad you care,” she exclaimed, but was interrupted by a knock at the door. Toft stuck his head in and she saw Suhr standing behind him.

  “Could
we come in?” Toft asked.

  She nodded, casting a quick glance at Suhr to discern whether he’d noticed that she’d come in late in order to decide if she ought to apologize. If he hadn’t noticed, she didn’t see the point in drawing his attention to it.

  “We succeeded in getting a picture of that Serbian man, Bosko,” Toft said.

  Louise could tell right away that Suhr did not deserve any of the credit for this accomplishment. Toft, in his terrier-like style, had doggedly pursued and obtained the photo.

  “We sent the picture around to all the precincts last night, but so far no one has responded to it,” Suhr reported. “But at least they have him up on their radar now and the patrols have been informed.”

  Suhr stepped all the way into the office while Toft remained in the doorway, leaning against the frame.

  “We would really like your assistance for the rest of the day,” Suhr said. When he saw Louise’s expression, he added that Willumsen had suggested it himself, that they put everything they could into confirming or disproving whether the Serb had been seen in or around Skelbækgade and Sønder Boulevard around the times of the two murders.

  “We’re going to make the rounds on Istedgade and the rest of the neighborhood with this picture,” he continued. “If it turns out that there aren’t any witnesses who saw him moving around in the area, then we’ll drag the two Albanians in and charge them with the killings and hope that that’s enough to make them talk.”

  “We have had them in here for questioning for the last two days,” Toft added as if to justify this harsh-sounding decision. “They’re not saying anything. Nothing at all. Except that they keep claiming it wasn’t them. They also clam up completely when we ask them to tell us what they know about Bosko. They just shake their heads and repeat that we should find out where he was when the two murders took place.”

  “So that’s what we’re going to spend the rest of the day on,” Suhr concluded. Then he corrected himself. “Of course, we’ll also find out if anyone saw him between the two killings.”

  Louise was still happy it was spring, but some of the effervescence was gone, replaced by an expectant restlessness. It suited her just fine to go back to Istedgade, even though she was kind of hoping they didn’t find him. Hard to tell what the consequences would be if an international criminal with a background like that set up shop in Copenhagen. She also knew that the reason she was looking forward to taking a little break from her own case so much was the way her conversation with Henrik Holm had ended the day before.

  “We’ll split the area up between you,” Suhr said and added that Mikkelsen was providing four people from the downtown precinct. “Willumsen will go with you, so there’ll be five of us from here,” Suhr continued, dropping the pictures on the table.

  Louise pushed one over to Lars and took the other one herself.

  She didn’t know what she’d imagined a man with so many human lives on his conscience would look like, but she was sure she’d seen him before, and she knew where, too.

  47

  CAMILLA HAD BROUGHT HER COMFORTER IN TO USE ON THE SOFA, where she turned on the morning shows as soon as Markus left for school. She hadn’t slept well at all. She shouldn’t have told the police about Jonas’s toe. The thoughts kept swirling around in her head, but she’d seen the pastor’s reaction when she mentioned that she thought there might be a connection. It had been there, but then it was gone again. At 3 A.M. she’d gotten up and shaken six sleep-inducing valerian pills out into her hand, but that hadn’t helped. The last time she looked at the clock, it was a little past 5:00. By that point, there was just under two hours until she had to get up to see Markus off. Now she ought to do some laundry. Markus had to wear a pair of sweats and a long-sleeved T-shirt whose arms were too short when she was forced to confirm that there was nothing else clean.

  But instead of getting up and gathering the laundry, she took her thoughts back to that evening, when she’d been sitting in the pastor’s kitchen. Suddenly, a new thought struck her. What if the stillborn baby in the church wasn’t related to the pastor, but to the son’s mother, Henrik’s late wife Alice? Then maybe that would explain why Henrik so categorically rejected that the two things had anything to do with each other.

  That was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to her before now, surely because she’d never known the boy’s mother. She’d only seen one picture of her, a photo of the three of them on the bookshelf at a dilapidated farm in Sweden where Markus had spent last Easter with Jonas and Henrik. Once in Laholm, Camilla had almost not been able to figure out the last bit of the way to the farm when it was time to go pick him up. Alice Holm smiled from the photograph, and she guessed it had been taken when Jonas was about three—one year before Alice died, eight years ago now.

  Camilla tried to remember what Henrik had said about his wife and their time in Bosnia. She didn’t know where they’d been stationed as aid workers, just that the camp had been in a small town that had been subjected to several brutal massacres in short succession.

  Camilla tossed the comforter aside and went into the bedroom to get her laptop. It didn’t take her long to figure out that it pretty much could only be Srebrenica, where the bodies from the brutal “ethnic cleansings” had been carted off to a huge mass grave outside of town.

  She also searched Infomedia to see if the pastor had written anything about his experiences in the Balkans. She determined that he had: there were six articles. Camilla felt a little flutter in her stomach where she hadn’t been feeling much of anything lately, but there turned out to be nothing to go on. They were all objective descriptions of the area, of the mood that weighed on the city like an overcast sky. He wrote that no one ever produced a concrete number of how many people had died in the brutal ethnic cleansing, but that it had affected all portions of the civilian population: men, women, children, the elderly. No one escaped. Maybe five, or eight, or ten thousand dead. Who knows? The point was that the correct number didn’t mean that much to the residents who were left anyway. “The people are broken and humiliated. There couldn’t be more sorrow, even if the tally went up.”

  He wrote well, Camilla observed, after she’d read all the way through. Gripping and clear. Even though the events were from fourteen years before, they got under her skin and gave her the sense of being a snotty-nosed, privileged dolt like the rest of the Danish population. No one here had experienced anything that came anywhere close to what the Muslims in the Balkans had suffered; and despite that, a large number of Danes still felt an inflated sense of arrogance toward the people who had been affected and had since come to Denmark to make a fresh start.

  She suddenly sat up, alert, concentrating as if she were listening to something. She didn’t move, trying to be sure, but then she realized she had no doubt that it had been there. Her cheeks pulled up and for a second she smiled, a smile no one saw, as to her great relief she noted that everything in her wasn’t dead after all.

  She felt indignation, rage at how ridiculously smug and egocentric people were. She was struck by it, and it made her want to write. Maybe it was a little late to be scolding people for the cold shoulder that had greeted so many asylum-seekers from the former Yugoslavia, but she yearned to do it. The last couple of weeks, she’d totally written off ever feeling this again. Apparently she just needed to be prodded hard enough.

  Camilla got up and went in to print out the six articles. Then she read them again, but aside from eliciting her compassion, there was nothing in what Henrik had written that seemed in any way related to his private life.

  She did manage to figure out that they’d been sent by the Red Cross, and that one of the people they’d shared their barracks with was Elsa Lynge. Camilla had run across her in connection with one of the big emergency aid collection drives, so she knew Elsa was still somehow affiliated with the organization.

  After a quick shower reinvigorated her, she sat down on the sofa and called the Danish Red Cross. She only had to talk to two pe
ople before she had Elsa Lynge on the line.

  “I’m calling you about a personal matter,” Camilla admitted right off the bat, and asked if she should call back at another time.

  “No, no, now’s as good as any,” Elsa responded. “But could I ask you to call me back on my cell in three minutes? Then I can just duck out and have a smoke.”

  Camilla smiled and jotted down Elsa’s cell number on the back of one of the pages she’d just printed out.

  “Henrik and Alice Holm,” Elsa repeated once Camilla had her back on the line. “Yeah, I know him, although now of course it’s mostly from the media, but I don’t think I remember her.”

  Camilla sank back in the sofa a little.

  “Can you think of anyone else I could try calling? Someone that you think might remember her?”

  “I’m going to need longer than a smoke break to think about that one,” Elsa admitted after a moment’s contemplation, during which Camilla could hear her puffing away heartily on her cigarette.

  “It was so long ago, and I’ve done so much traveling, but if you tell me what you need to know, then maybe that would make it a little easier for me to think of who you should talk to.”

  Very briefly and without going into too many details, Camilla explained that she had been the one who found the stillborn infant in Henrik Holm’s church, and that she had reason to believe that there might be some connection between the baby in the church and the baby the Holms had while they were living in the refugee camp.

  Camilla heard Elsa’s lighter clicking and a hoarse cough as Elsa lit the next cigarette.

  “I can tell you one thing for sure,” Elsa said once she finished coughing. “In the two and a half years I was there, none of the aid workers in our camp had a baby. The conditions just weren’t suitable for babies,” Elsa said, clearing her throat when her voice became gravelly. “Of course there were tons of kids and babies who had survived with their mothers or who were left behind after the rest of the family had been wiped out.”