The Midnight Witness

by Sara Blaedel

  He was startled when she grabbed his arm and said, “Hi, how’s it going?”

  “I’m burned out, haven’t been home since yesterday. You headed back to the paper?”

  She shook her head and explained that she was going somewhere for a cup of hot chocolate because she was royally pissed off.

  He thought about that. “I’ll go with you.”

  They sat in a corner, and even before their hot chocolate arrived, Camilla had told him about the photo situation.

  He laid his hand over hers. “It’s a real shitty situation, but there’s not much you can do. The photo editor has the say on photos, and that’s that.”

  She didn’t feel like talking about it, but she leaned forward when the waiter came and handed her the cup. The small bowl of whipped cream raised her spirits. Strangely enough, extra calories often cured her bad moods. “So tell me, how are you? I see from the paper you’ve been busy.”

  “Yeah, we’re trying to cover every angle. Everything they said about Frank at the press briefing has to be followed up. I don’t know what the hell’s going on. I’ve been out all night, trying to find somebody who knows something, but I didn’t have much luck. I think it’s a hit. No one saw anything, no one heard anything, and that’s a little strange.”

  Camilla nodded. She didn’t know much about that crowd.

  “The drug case is coming up day after tomorrow. Frank worked on it a long time, and I got this feeling he dug something up that isn’t supposed to come out during the trial. I don’t know that, though. Just a guess. I’m meeting one of my sources this evening. Maybe he’ll have something for me.”

  “You need to get something written for tomorrow?”

  He shook his head. “They’re going with your interview. I’m off the hook until the end of the week. But the police might have something new, so we need to keep in touch with them.”

  Camilla let that hang in the air. She had a really good idea of who would be in charge of doing that.

  6

  Signe Jensen had never met Karoline’s boyfriend and knew none of her girlfriends, but she had only good things to say about Karoline. She cried throughout the interview.

  They sat in a small meeting room for personnel. On the table stood a thermos, a stack of the hospital’s small white coffee cups, a sugar bowl, and a creamer.

  Every time she asked a new question, Louise said, “I’m sorry, but I have to ask you…” Finally, she realized how annoying that sounded, but focusing on the interview was hard, because the girl was sobbing so intensely. Louise was only trying to soften the blow of Karoline’s murder.

  Louise stared at the large whiteboard hanging at the back of the room. Two patient names were written under each room number, with the days of the week in a column on the left side. Marie Larsen had physical therapy on Wednesdays and Fridays. Louise’s thoughts wandered as she read the many names and schedules. Signe was still crying. Louise took a deep breath and was about to try again when Jørgensen spoke up.

  “Okay, listen. We’ll be finished here in just a bit. You’d be doing us a big favor if you could pull yourself together and be an adult for the next five minutes.”

  The girl straightened up and looked in surprise at Jørgensen. As if she’d only now noticed him. “Of course, I’m sorry.” She waited for him to continue.

  A hint of irritation rose up in Louise, but she put it aside. She smiled at Lars before finishing up the interview, which didn’t give them anything new.

  “Sometimes a few sharp words from an outsider helps,” Jørgensen said after the nurse left the room.

  Louise nodded. “Maybe I should have raised my voice.”

  “Not at all, then she’d have clammed up on you. You’re great at getting people to talk.”

  Louise looked at him, a bit disoriented now. “She didn’t talk, she cried.”

  “In the last half hour, she told you everything worth knowing about her feelings…yeah, about her entire life.”

  Louise smiled. “You’re right. But I was trying to get her to tell us something about Karoline’s life and feelings.”

  “If she’d known something about Karoline, she would’ve told you. Now you can say in good conscience that Signe Jensen doesn’t know anything useful to us.”

  “Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Louise had expected Jesper Mørk, the murdered nurse’s male colleague, to be the same age as the rest of their nursing school class. But when he entered the office in his white coat, she guessed him to be around thirty.

  “Thirty-two,” he said when she asked.

  His voice was a bit hoarse, and his dull brown hair had been tucked behind his ears.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” Louise pointed at the cups on the table and pushed the thermos over to him.

  Nine years is a big difference at that age, she thought. Karoline had been eighteen when she was with Mørk, so he must have been twenty-seven. She hadn’t imagined this ex-boyfriend could have a wife and children.

  “When did you and Karoline become a couple?”

  Louise checked his eyes for any lingering feelings, but all she saw was a vague mournfulness. No pain, no emotional reaction.

  “We were together less than a year. It started right before she turned eighteen.”

  Louise wrote in her notebook as he spoke. “How did it begin…I mean, there’s quite a gap in your ages?”

  His laugh was brief and dry. “Yeah, nine years is a lot, especially for girls that age. When you’re on the other side of thirty, no one thinks about a man being nine years older than his wife.”

  “Exactly.” She resigned herself to him not volunteering much. Anything would have to be dragged out of him. She leaned back in her chair. “So tell me about it.”

  “She fell in love, that’s about it. We were in the same group at nursing school. I trained to be a metalworker, but after my apprenticeship I knew it wasn’t for me, so I moved on.”

  “Big change in professions,” Louise said, hoping he would stick with her.

  “Personal development, is how I’d put it.”

  Louise nodded. She noticed he had trouble concentrating. She leaned toward him and immediately was annoyed at herself; some interviews felt wrong from the very start and were hard to get on track. She spoke sharply. “Would you please tell me how you got together?”

  He squirmed in his chair. “She hit on me. I had a girlfriend I was living with.”

  He paused, inspected his hands. “I guess I was flattered about being seduced.” He looked up at her in defiance.

  “You didn’t fall in love with her?”

  “Yeah, but not until later. At first, I was in love with the affair, the game, the flirting.”

  “With screwing someone on the side?” The words flew out of Louise’s mouth; she didn’t mean to give him a hard time, but a crude remark would hopefully shake him out of this conceited romantic crap he was feeding her.

  Sometimes you just have to yell pussy at people to get a reaction. Camilla had taught her that once, and there was some truth to it.

  “Okay, yeah, maybe.”

  “So explain to me. Were you having an affair while you were still living with your girlfriend, or did you drop your girlfriend and start up with Karoline?”

  He thought about that for a while. “A little time went by before we became a couple.” He reached for his cup and took a sip of coffee.

  That didn’t fit with Louise’s picture of Karoline. A girl from a nice family with a white console table and tasteful furnishings wasn’t the type to lose her head and go after someone already taken. But apparently, she’d been wrong. “So, you had an affair, and it ended up with you two together, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The relationship lasted…” She looked at her notebook.

  He helped her out. “Eleven and a half months.”

  “Okay.” She had that written down already, but she made a note that he knew exactly how long they’d bee
n together. “How did it end?”

  He slumped and stared at his hands again. Finally, he said, “She met someone else.”

  Louise sighed heavily. Luckily, Jørgensen wasn’t sitting there watching all this, though he’d have gotten a lot out of it, and he surely wouldn’t have been complimenting her on how well she was doing.

  “You must be talking about Martin Dahl,” she said, looking away.

  “I don’t remember his name.”

  She straightened up and stared at him in surprise. “Are you saying she had a boyfriend after you and before she met the man she moved in with?”

  He shrugged.

  Louise leaned forward. “Why do you have a problem talking about this?”

  “I don’t have a problem with it. There’s just nothing more to tell.”

  “Did you kill Karoline Wissinge?”

  The question knifed through the air between them. And the reaction came just as she suspected it would—immediately.

  “Oh, for God’s sake—no, of course I didn’t.”

  He looked like an overgrown puppy and talked like Louise’s aunt and her friends searching for things to fuel their outrage. The same aggrieved tone.

  “We’ll get back to that later. Right now, I want to hear exactly how this relationship that lasted eleven and a half months started and ended. Would you be so kind as to tell me? I’m all ears.”

  He looked pale now, she was happy to see.

  “The girl I was living with saw us together at a café, so there was no reason to deny it when she accused me. I was going to tell her, but just hadn’t got around to it.”

  Louise jotted everything down without looking at him.

  “We were planning on living together…”

  “Go on.”

  “Suddenly I just wasn’t interesting anymore. She terminated me. Dumped me.”

  Louise cut him off before he really got going. “That was when she met the other guy?”

  He nodded slowly, several times.

  “Thanks.” Louise stood up. “We might need to speak with you again, but right now this is all we’ll need from you.”

  He stared at the table while she spoke. She began packing up, and he came to life again. He stood expectantly, as if he wasn’t aware they were finished.

  Louise walked by him and opened the door. “Bye,” she said, without shaking his hand. She looked around for the head nurse, Anna Wallentin, who was nowhere in sight. She started down the hall to the large bank of elevators.

  Lars Jørgensen was standing by the car when she came out.

  “Strange guy,” she said as she approached him.

  “How’s that?”

  “I don’t know if there was something he didn’t want to tell me, but I had to wrestle every word out of him.”

  “Was he lying?”

  “Mmm, I don’t think so. He kept going on about how they became a couple, but it really was all about him having another girlfriend when they met, and then Karoline dumped him, she met someone else, who almost has to be Martin Dahl.”

  “But were they still friends?” They stopped at a red light, and Jørgensen eyed her.

  “Yeah, the four girls and Mørk usually ate lunch together. I think Karoline kept to her friends from nursing school. She hadn’t been at the hospital that long, though. I guess it makes sense.”

  “Maybe he still had the hots for her?”

  “It didn’t seem like that to me. He’s probably just a little strange.”

  The office was cold when they got back. The window stood open, and Louise smelled cigarette smoke. Someone had used the room for an interview while they were gone, she guessed. She left the window open and packed her things. She had to take the bus because Peter had driven her in that morning. It annoyed her now; it would have been nice to bike home.

  She walked up to Central Station and waited for bus 15. Suddenly she regretted saying she’d come home for dinner. They wouldn’t have much time; Peter played badminton at seven. She could call and hear how far along he was with dinner. Maybe they should meet somewhere to eat.

  The phone rang; she was so startled that she almost dropped it.

  “It’s me, sorry to bother you again,” Camilla said. She sounded nothing like the euphoric woman from earlier that day.

  “It’s okay. What’s wrong?”

  “I think I’m going to have to quit.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?”

  Louise saw the bus coming, but she stepped back. She had to hear this.

  “They’re crazy here. I won’t be a part of it.”

  Camilla summed up what had happened, why she was prepared to put her job on the line. “It’s a matter of credibility.”

  Louise had to agree with her. But was it necessary to resign? That sounded extreme.

  “There’s only so much I’ll take. I don’t understand Terkel; he’s sick in the head.”

  “Calm down. Getting yourself all worked up won’t help.”

  Dumb thing to say, Louise thought. But she couldn’t take it back.

  “There’s absolutely every reason to get worked up,” Camilla snapped.

  And in a way, she was right. Louise would hate to be in her shoes. In her experience, though, it was smartest to keep a cool head, otherwise people might call you hysterical. Your words carried less weight when you screamed them out. She’d tried to explain that to Camilla many times.

  After a moment, she said, “Are you really prepared to quit if they print the photo?”

  “That’s what I’m not sure about.” Camilla seemed to mull that over a moment. “Like hell I’m not! I’m sure. I can always freelance.”

  “Okay then, it’s settled. If you really feel that way, it’ll be easier to stand up for what you believe is right.”

  The bus approached. Camilla’s conviction was back, it sounded like. Louise crossed her fingers for a happy ending.

  Camilla took a deep breath and walked back down the hall. She might as well get it over with. Høyer’s door was closed. She knocked on the door resolutely and walked in.

  “What have you decided?” she said, before he could open his mouth.

  He looked at her in annoyance.

  “Did you find a photo?”

  “Yes, we have one, so you don’t need to go back to Helle.”

  She sat down across from him. “Do you really think you could have made me do that?”

  He eyed her for a moment. “No, I wasn’t counting on it. But you really need to get rid of these hang-ups of yours.”

  “I don’t have any goddamn hang-ups, I just treat people decently. Funny, but I thought you did the same.”

  She reminded herself to sound calm; her voice had jumped an octave at the end. She breathed deeply into her diaphragm, checked her watch, and said, “The time is five fifty-eight p.m. I resign.”

  He glared at her. “I won’t let you.” He straightened up in his chair. “I’m a little busy right now, can we do this later? You have a message to call Detective Superintendent Willumsen at Homicide.”

  He waved her over to the door and turned back to his computer screen.

  “I mean it,” she said. But all he did was point to the door.

  What the hell was going on? She went back to her office and read the message. Let him call that old grouch Willumsen. He was the last thing she needed right now.

  Before she could sit down, her phone rang. “Camilla Lind.”

  “Is this the star reporter from Morgenavisen?” a deep voice said.

  She frowned.

  “Willumsen here.” Now she was totally confused. The detective wasn’t in the habit of calling her.

  “Hello, Willumsen. I just saw the message to call you.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t; that’s why I’m calling you.”

  Camilla was bewildered.

  “We’re reconstructing the movements of Frank Sørensen on Saturday night, and I thought you might help us by asking your readers if anyone saw him, if I tell you where we t
hink he was.”

  “I think Søren Holm is covering the story,” she said, without sounding too discouraging. There was no reason to go into this, now that she had resigned.

  He ignored her. “Your boss just said you’re the one. Got something to write with?”

  She sighed and found a notepad in the pile on her desk, then she searched her drawer for a pen. “Okay.”

  “We know he was here at Police Headquarters late Saturday evening, and we assume he biked to the Royal Hotel. But we don’t know if he stopped anywhere on the way.”

  Camilla was puzzled. “What was he doing there so late Saturday?”

  “I’ll get to that. The hotel employees didn’t see him, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. We’d love to talk to anyone who recognizes Frank Sørensen from a photo, who saw him biking between Police Headquarters and the hotel around ten Saturday night.”

  Camilla wrote that down.

  “Did you get that? To begin with, it would be a great help to get this going.”

  “What was he doing at Police Headquarters?” she asked again.

  Pause. “He spoke with Birte Jensen. That’s between you and me. But give her a call and talk to her.”

  “Who’s Birte Jensen?” Camilla felt like a greenhorn.

  “Birte is the head of Narcotics and Licensing; she’s running the investigation Sørensen was covering. The drug case.”

  “Okay. But will she talk to me?” Camilla hoped she didn’t sound too surprised. You could hardly pry a word out of the heads of Department A and NL, that much she knew.

  “She said she’ll contact you. She’ll decide what to tell you. It’s no secret there’s probably a connection between the drug case and Frank Sørensen’s death. But call her. She’s okay.” He hung up.

  Camilla was still holding the phone when Høyer knocked and came in. “Are you resigning, right now?” he asked, with a straight face.

  “No, I am not resigning right now,” she snapped. She thought about what Willumsen had told her.