by Sara Blaedel
Louise didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”
“Several things went wrong when we found Frank Sørensen.” He poured coffee for all of them. “At first we thought it was a natural death. We assumed he’d suffered fall-related injuries, abrasions like those often found on alcoholics when they fall down drunk. His injuries weren’t very serious, but he stank from booze and he’d bit his tongue. That’s common in those cases. It wasn’t until we found the puncture wound and got the results back from our tests that we discovered he didn’t have a drop of alcohol in his blood.”
“So why did he stink of booze?” Louise said.
Flemming shrugged. “It was only his coat; someone apparently poured a bottle of whiskey over him to trick us. The samples did show, though, that he’d been sedated with GHB—fantasy, or easy lay, it’s also called. It makes people more open and susceptible. Some men put it in drinks to get a girl to come home with them. You lose your defense mechanisms.”
All this was new to Louise. She’d heard that Sørensen had been doped, but she hadn’t known it was this kind of drug.
“We took similar samples this morning, and the results are on the way,” Flemming said. “There’s no question the drug made it easier to handle Frank Sørensen. He was no lightweight, and neither was Søren Holm.”
Louise wondered how Flemming could keep a distance from these people he was talking about. Less than a week ago they had met Søren just outside, where he’d insisted on seeing his friend. And now he was the one laid out on the table. She felt bile rising. Quickly she took a drink of coffee and forced herself to think of other things.
They sat in silence. She studied the only decoration in the room, a large framed reproduction of a wild ocean. She couldn’t see who had painted it, but clearly it had been picked out to match the curtains alongside the broad window.
Back on the second floor, the body had been opened with a single long, straight incision. Åse brought out her camera again, and Louise pulled an office chair on wheels to the wall and sat down. Flemming slowly lifted the organs that had been freed. The neck area had been opened, and from the side the wound was visible and could be measured.
“A transverse, upward, slightly gaping puncture wound is visible in the neck, two by zero point five centimeters,” Flemming told the forensic technologist.
Louise jotted that down.
After studying the wound closely, he said, “I’m certain the perpetrator used the same sharp knife, or one identical to it. It’s the same type of wound, resulting in a severe lesion on the backbone.” He and the tech described in detail the puncture wound. Everything was photographed and recorded.
Louise guessed that the killer’s height could be estimated by an examination of the path and angle of the wound. She was also curious to hear about the force of the wound, which would give her an idea of the killer’s physique.
“The wound is just under the cranium, between the base of the skull and C1. That’s difficult if the perpetrator is shorter than the victim.” Flemming looked around at them. “I had the same impression with Frank Sørensen, but at the time I thought it was because he’d been stabbed on the ground.”
Again, that was news to Louise, but she assumed it was simply because she hadn’t been updated.
An hour later they were finished. Flemming needed to start writing the autopsy report so it would be ready when his boss showed up.
They threw their gowns into a large sack. “The cause of death is presumably the puncture wound in the neck, which severed the spinal cord.”
Louise was about to leave, when a woman in a lab coat walked in and handed Flemming a sheet of paper. After leaning back against the wall and skimming it, he looked up for a moment, lost in thought.
“We’ll have to go back in.”
The two techs exchanged glances, then they followed him.
“What’s going on?” Louise said as she fished her gown up out of the sack and grabbed a new mask.
“He’s been jabbed,” Flemming said. He seemed frustrated.
Louise frowned. Jabbed? Yeah, of course, that was what they’d already concluded. She waited for an explanation, but he ignored her and walked over to the body. The two lab assistants were nearly finished sewing him up.
“Let’s turn him over,” Flemming said.
A click echoed through the room when he turned on the blinding light above the steel table and pulled it down to the back of Holm’s head. He leaned over and examined the wound. Everyone else stepped in closer for a better look, though far enough away to not disturb him.
“I’ll be damned if I can see it,” he said, straightening up. He turned to them. “The perpetrator took the time to inject him with an overdose.”
Louise shivered. “Can he have been injected without putting up a fight?” She couldn’t quite see that.
Fleming weighed her question. “Maybe. If he was totally unprepared for it, he wouldn’t have reacted instinctively. But if he was alert, and you have to imagine Holm was alert, maybe not expecting to be shot up with something but aware of what was going on…yeah, it’s hard to see it.”
The others nodded.
Louise walked over to the table. “Surely he was lying down, too, when his spinal cord was cut?”
“Probably.” Flemming stood beside her at the table. “The drug could also have been injected somewhere else. It’s a possibility. But it’s logical to think the perpetrator camouflaged the injection with the stab wound, since we didn’t find a needle mark anywhere on his body.”
Louise walked around; she needed to get some fresh air.
“Let’s have them look for a needle mark in his clothes,” Flemming said to the techs. They nodded. The clothes he’d been wearing were to be examined at Forensic Services, and they were already packed singly in paper bags, ready to be taken.
Åse agreed to call Louise when they’d finished with the clothes. Louise wanted to know the results before the official report was done.
The sun was shining as Louise unlocked her bike and rode along Fælled Park. She regretted not bringing sunglasses along; the glare of the spring sunlight blinded her after the many hours spent in the intense artificial light. She leaned the bike against the back wall of Police Headquarters and hurried up the steps. It was just past three when she entered the department’s bathroom and glanced in the mirror; it wouldn’t be good to look windblown and out of breath. Then she prepared herself to talk to a grieving, sobbing family the rest of the day.
She rapped on the door to her office and walked in. No one there. That suited her just fine. She’d be on top of things when they arrived. She checked her phone—no messages—then laid her bag and coat down and went to find something to drink.
Out in the kitchen, she almost ran into Suhr’s secretary. “The wife and two daughters are in his office,” the secretary said as Louise poured herself a glass of water.
“Will they be long?” Louise said.
“I don’t think so. They arrived fifteen minutes ago.”
Jørgensen was there when she got back to the office. “New orders.”
She stared at him.
“We’re going in to Morgenavisen.”
“What? But the family’s here.”
“Yeah, but Willumsen just dropped in. He wants to oversee the questioning, and he was in no mood to argue about it.”
“So, what’s the plan?” Louise gulped down her water.
“I just spoke to the managing editor, Terkel Høyer. He’ll make sure everyone working the crime beat is there when we arrive.”
She nodded. She wouldn’t be able to avoid Camilla after all. The situation was going to be awkward.
“They’ll provide a room for us to question everyone. A few techs are coming in, too; they’ll go through Holm’s office.”
She nodded again.
“They might already be there,” he added.
“How did Høyer sound when you talked to him?” She remembered what Camilla had told her about his r
eaction when he found out Frank Sørensen had been killed. Now it had happened again.
“He wasn’t happy, but he seemed clearheaded enough.”
“It must be pretty damn tense in there,” she said. “Two reporters killed; it can’t be a coincidence.”
“No, probably not. Well. Shall we go? We have a car.”
She stood up, grabbed her bag, and laid the folder with notes from the autopsy on the table. It would be late before she got home. First, she’d have to type the notes up, then she’d have to write a report about the interviews they were about to conduct. She sighed and grabbed her coat.
On the way down the hall, Louise said, “How many will be there?”
“Two reporters, Camilla Lind and Ole Kvist, then there’s an intern, Jakob, and the crime editor. And there’s the photo editor and the three photographers, but only two of them are full-time, the other is a freelancer. I don’t know if we’ll be talking to him.” Jørgensen held the front door open for her.
“We’ll only need to talk to him if he’s been working with Holm since the murder of Frank Sørensen.”
They parked on Gothersgade and walked along the King’s Garden. She realized she hadn’t been thinking about food since the autopsy, but now she was hungry. Though she didn’t know how anyone could be hungry after witnessing an autopsy.
“You want to do the talking, or would you rather write?” Jørgensen asked while they waited for the elevator.
Louise shrugged. “We can trade off. It’s hard to write for hours at a time.”
He nodded.
Høyer met them on the second floor. His face was ashen and pinched as he held out his hand and introduced himself.
“We cleared out a room for you, last door to the left.” He pointed, and they thanked him. On the way, Louise noticed the door to Camilla’s office was closed. She’d been there a few times, but she’d never met any of her colleagues.
There was a case of cola on the floor in the room, cups and glasses on a small buffet.
“Our secretary is bringing coffee and tea. Let us know if there’s anything else you’d like. We’ve ordered sandwiches for everyone; they’ll be here at five.”
He sat down at the white oval table and slumped in his chair. “This is goddamn tough. We have a lot of pages to fill, and no one wants to do it; it’s impossible to care about writing when you’re covering the death of a colleague.”
They nodded and sat down across from him.
“We spent most of the day sitting around talking; we only started to work an hour ago. And now you’re here.”
He spread his arms out in resignation.
“We need to send flowers to his wife,” he said, into the air.
They let him talk.
He smiled in apology. “Of course, I want everyone to take their time in here with you, it’s just that we’re under pressure. One of the news journalists on the fifth floor is coming down to help until we’re back on our feet. The entire newspaper assembled after lunch, our editor in chief told everyone about the murder, and of course we needed to talk afterward. We don’t know many of the details yet.”
Louise wondered for a moment if they’d start interviewing each other, but she cut off that thought. This wasn’t the time for sarcasm. “Clearly you’re all shocked by this.”
“Are you the one who knows Camilla Lind?” he asked.
She nodded.
“She’s not doing so well. We offered to bring in a crisis counselor for her.” They’d offered the same to everyone at the paper, he added.
Louise brought out paper and a pen from her bag and laid them on the table, hoping it would signal that she was here to work, not to talk about her friend. She felt a pang of guilt, though. Shouldn’t she go in and give Camilla a hug? She had to be suffering, in the middle of all this, especially after the episode with Holm the previous day. And what the hell, everyone knew they were friends anyway. But they needed to start interviewing people. Everything else would have to wait.
“Who do you want to start with?” Høyer said.
“How about you?” Jørgensen said.
They hadn’t discussed that before they arrived, but Louise quickly nodded.
“Okay, I’ll just tell the others.” Which he did. He came back in, sat down, and looked at them expectantly.
18
Camilla deleted the first paragraph and started the article again, her third attempt. Her face was puffy from crying. She was supposed to do a portrait of Søren Holm, but every time she started, it sounded like a section of Who’s Who. She wanted to give it more life, but how? She had all the facts in front of her: when he’d graduated from the School of Media and Journalism, places of employment, date of marriage, first child born. And yet she couldn’t see him in what she wrote.
She rested her head in her hands and tried in vain to picture him. She’d found an article from the staff publication, and she’d planned to use some of it, but she couldn’t sense him. It just wasn’t working, and every time she tried, she thought about the squabble they’d had. Which gave her a guilty conscience. Tears began welling again. She’d been so angry with him, so certain that his warning about the danger she could be in came from wanting the story for himself. That was the first thing she’d thought when she heard about his death: that he’d meant what he said.
She took another stab at it. For over seventeen years, Søren Holm was a journalist at Morgenavisen. She stopped, looked at what she’d written. Rubbed her eyes, shook her head. She couldn’t do this, couldn’t even make a last attempt. She closed the document and went out to find Høyer, to tell him someone else would have to write this. An article about what had happened would be better for her. She could handle that.
His office door was closed. She knocked and waited, but when there was no answer, she opened the door and saw he wasn’t there.
Ole Kvist walked by. “He’s in with the police,” he said.
How could he be so unaffected? When the editor in chief had told them the news earlier, he’d also seemed a bit remote. Camilla guessed that he and Holm might have been rivals at some point, competing to be the star reporter at the paper. And Holm had won. Maybe the loss wasn’t so tough for Kvist.
“What are you working on?” she asked, before he walked into his office.
“I’m trying to find someone who saw Søren yesterday evening. The police aren’t saying much, and it’s not very goddamn easy when we all have to stick around here. I need to get out and talk to people who live on Vestergade.”
He was absolutely right. She walked back to the office to see if she had ten kroner for a cola. Then she checked Ritzau for something more about the killing. They’d assumed the head of Homicide would hold a press conference, but when Høyer spoke with him early that afternoon, he said he didn’t have time. They would have to keep an eye on the news bureau, and he would be sending out press releases when there were new developments.
She was in her chair, staring out the window, when someone knocked. Her thoughts were on everything Holm had said to her the day before. She’d tried to get hold of Birte Jensen, she needed to talk to her, ask what the hell was going on, if Holm had called her. But Jensen hadn’t called back.
Another knock. She glanced at the door. “Come in.” A tall man stuck his head in and introduced himself. Lars Jørgensen, Homicide.
He smiled. “We’d like to speak with you now.”
Butterflies fluttered in her stomach when she stood up. She’d never been questioned by the police before. She’d written about it many times, but now it was her turn. She followed him to the meeting room and then stopped abruptly when she saw Louise.
“Hi,” she said, faltering a bit. She nodded at her friend; it felt normal yet strange to see her.
“Hi.” Louise smiled and gestured for her to sit down.
“May I tell my boss something before we start?” Camilla blushed when she sensed that it was an odd thing to say. Deep down she felt insecure, which surprised her. There was no r
eason at all to feel uncomfortable with the situation so far, but she did.
“That’s fine,” Jørgensen said.
She thought he might follow her, but he didn’t.
“Good Lord,” Louise said when Camilla left. “She’s falling apart.”
He nodded thoughtfully, as if he was imprinting on his brain how Camilla Lind looked.
“She had a run-in with Holm yesterday, just so you know, if she doesn’t mention it,” Louise said. “I mean, not that she killed him or anything,” she hastened to add. “But it’s probably why she’s so crushed.”
Camilla returned and sat down across from them. “Søren Holm gave me one hell of a cussing out yesterday,” she said, before Jørgensen could even ask her name and personal ID number.
Louise smiled at her. She couldn’t help but enjoy her friend’s way of barging right in. And it was also nice that she spoke directly to Jørgensen.
After relating what Holm had told her, Camilla started crying. She dried her tears off and apologized. “It’s just so damn strange. Yesterday I was mad as hell at him because I thought he was overreacting. You know that.” She glanced at Louise.
“And I woke up in the middle of the night, still furious with him, how goddamn unfair he was, acting out of self-interest, and there I was, there in bed cussing him out, while he was being stabbed to death.”
She broke down, began sobbing deeply.
Louise went over and found a pack of Kleenex in her bag. She laid it in front of Camilla and squeezed her shoulder.
“He was right,” Camilla stammered, struggling to stop crying, her eyes already red. She looked up at them. “What the hell is going on, anyway?”
She blew her nose, and Jørgensen and Louise waited for her to compose herself.
“It sounds like a line from a bad B movie, but it could have been my spinal cord they cut.” She couldn’t stop her tears.
Louise had thought the same thing. Her chest ached.
“That’s not how you should look at it,” Jørgensen said, trying to comfort her. Then he asked her to repeat everything Holm had said to her. She couldn’t remember so much other than he felt it was too dangerous for her to snoop around.