The Running Girl

by Sara Blaedel

  But it got her thinking. Then one morning after lying in bed most of the night as she did now—gazing at the ceiling with her hands folded behind her neck—she decided that’s what she had to do, if she didn’t want to lose Markus.

  Camilla pulled a thick sweater from her suitcase, then walked over to the window and opened the curtains a smidge. A wedge of sunlight cut through the room’s darkness and fell on the bed and her sleeping son.

  Straight ahead of her was the Space Needle, the city’s landmark where she’d promised Markus they’d eat at the very top in a restaurant that revolved 360 degrees, giving panoramic views of the city.

  It looked nice out there, with the water and the harbor. A bunch of boats were out sailing.

  One could always just jump, she suddenly thought and leaned her forehead against the window pane. Their room was on the twenty-second floor, and the miniature life down on the street gave her an odd sinking feeling in her stomach and sent shivers down her spine.

  “Are you up?” Markus asked from the bed.

  Camilla quickly stepped away from the window. She stood for a moment, until she felt ready to turn around and smile.

  “Not really. I just got out of bed and was looking around for a room service menu, so we could order breakfast. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  “Do you think they have pancakes or waffles?”

  He was already out of bed and stood next to her with his mouth slightly open. His gaze took in everything innocently.

  Camilla tousled his hair and drew him close. She squeezed his boy’s body and felt peaceful standing there with him and looking out over a foreign city in a foreign country. It didn’t make sense that a twelve-year-old boy should be her pillar of strength. It ought to be the other way around.

  10

  Eggs, bacon, toast, English muffins, bagels, scones, pancakes, Danishes—Camilla couldn’t get herself to order the pastry that had made Danes famous over there, even though it bore little resemblance to what you’d get at a real bakery in Denmark. There was also fruit, hot cocoa, and a pot of Earl Grey with warm milk beside it. When the whole thing was rolled in on a table, Camilla could tell she’d overdone it. She hurried to get a handful of dollar bills, so she’d be ready with the tip when everything was in place.

  They managed about half of it before they had to give up and stack the plates in a tall pile on the tray, which Camilla set out in the hall. Then she put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and crawled back into bed.

  She took out the newspapers she’d grabbed on the SAS flight. Morgenavisen and Berlingske both teemed with the Sachs-Smith scandal. The old and well-reputed family dynasty that owned Termo-Lux had built up an enormous fortune with thermal windows. The family was on the list of the country’s richest people, and now they’d been hit with a messy and salacious scandal that was rocking the media world.

  Camilla turned the pages with interest.

  It had been a couple of weeks since the flag at the dynasty’s headquarters in Roskilde was set at half-mast and the news outlet Ritzau had reported the sad news that Inger Sachs-Smith, married to the head of the family, Walther Sachs-Smith, had taken her own life. She’d been found in her bed with two empty bottles of sleeping pills on the nightstand.

  All the papers had cleared their front page. It became the tragic top story for many days, because in the wake of the suicide it leaked out that there was a coup, or a family takeover of power, at Termo-Lux. In the meantime, neither board members, sources in the firm, nor even their press secretary had been willing to comment. That left it with the conjectures and analyses from industry experts, who believed that the two youngest children—Carl Emil, thirty-eight, and Rebekka, two years younger—along with the family’s attorney had convinced Walther Sachs-Smith that he should pass on power to the next generation, even though he was still joint owner of the family business, founded sixty years earlier by his grandparents in a rather humble area on the outskirts of Roskilde.

  Now she read that Walther Sachs-Smith had disappeared and had been gone for at least three days. A few days after his wife’s burial, he was reported missing, and now the vast majority of the press guessed that he’d chosen to follow his wife in death.

  Business reporters interviewed experts about the consequences of a power takeover, given that the two siblings were the only family members left on the board and the attorney had only recently been appointed. Gossip columnists were more interested in digging up everything they could on Carl Emil and Rebekka, not least their associations with the royal family’s younger generation.

  Camilla didn’t have the energy for that part of the story. She had a hard time imagining anything more trivial, after what the children had done to their parents. She’d always had a good impression of the Sachs-Smith family, not that she knew them personally, but she’d grown up in Roskilde. The parents always struck her as sympathetic and straightforward, despite their being loaded with money. The father often had to step in and smooth things out when his two youngest children got a little too carried away with their jet-set lifestyle.

  Markus had turned on the TV and was surfing through the channels, deeply impressed with the selection. For the moment, he was watching America’s Funniest Home Videos.

  She took up the second newspaper, sighing over how they could spend two whole pages repeating the story of Inger Sachs-Smith’s suicide and the domestic worker who’d found her in her bedroom.

  SHE DIED IN HER SLEEP

  In the caption, it said that Fru Inger had emptied two bottles of potent sleeping pills, so she hadn’t been in any doubt over what she was doing. She wanted to die.

  More gossip about Carl Emil’s numerous lovers and his alleged fondness for kinky sex, and the same old stuff about Rebekka’s ex-husband and the child they’d had together. The girl was in kindergarten, and the picture of her was big enough that all of her classmates would easily recognize her—if anyone still needed to be told that it was her mother who’d apparently driven her grandparents to their deaths.

  How awful, thought Camilla.

  She flipped through.

  On the next page, she paused over a picture of the somewhat lesser known big brother. The eldest of the children.

  Frederik Sachs-Smith hadn’t lived in Denmark for the last fifteen years. As a twenty-seven-year-old, he’d moved to the U.S.A. and had never been part of the jet-set inner circle. Still, she recognized his face because she’d written about him when his first American film premiered in Hollywood.

  He was the outsider who’d turned his back on the family dynasty to follow his dream. Before he moved to the U.S.A., he’d gone to the Copenhagen Film School and written screenplays for two Danish feature films, neither of which met with noteworthy success. After that, he applied to and was accepted at a well-known film school in New York and, as far as Camilla recalled, by then he’d already pulled up stakes for good. She thought of him as a mixture of upper-class bohemian and cool businessman. It cost him absolutely nothing if his projects succeeded or failed, because he had so much money in his checkbook that he really didn’t need to earn anything. Along with his film work, he was also a financier and investor and had evidently used his inheritance from his grandparents and the money from his parents wisely. At any rate, he’d made himself a considerable fortune and obviously wouldn’t be affected by the shockwaves that hit the family’s economy.

  Camilla knew the stuff about the money only because Markus was in the same class as Signe and she was good friends with Britt Fasting-Thomsen. Ulrik, Signe’s father, was Frederik Sachs-Smith’s investment consultant and financial advisor. The previous year Ulrik had been so involved in his work for Sachs-Smith that it had cost him his summer vacation with Britt and Signe.

  While Ulrik was away in the U.S.A., Camilla and Markus joined Britt and Signe at their summer house up in Skagen. They’d had some marvelous weeks together, with chilled white wine in the garden and steaks from Munch’s Butcher Shop.

  She looked at the photo. Fred
erik Sachs-Smith. Forty-two years old, unmarried, and with an arrogant but somewhat charming smile. His medium-length blond hair blew in the breeze as he stood in bare feet on the edge of his pool at his house in Santa Barbara where, she read, he’d lived for the last eight years after several in New York and L.A.

  Camilla folded the newspapers and tossed them on the floor, then crawled over to Markus in the big queen-size bed. He lay there laughing at people who fell on their asses or got hit in the head with a surfboard. The worse they got hurt, the more the audience laughed at them. Pretty tasteless.

  Even so, Camilla couldn’t help laughing herself when a severely overweight man tried to drive his lawn tractor up a slope and was furious when it stopped halfway to the top. Finally, he backed up, got a good running start, and came at it full throttle. The result was that the little tractor and the large man both went end-over. It had to hurt like hell, but it looked outrageously funny when he hung there suspended between the slope and his lawn tractor.

  “What time is it in Denmark?” asked Markus, looking at the clock radio’s digital numbers.

  “They’re nine hours ahead of us, so it’s ten thirty at night.”

  “Then Signe’s party’s over now.”

  She nodded. She’d hoped he’d forgotten it. Understood perfectly well that he was sorry to miss it.

  “Oh, no!” he yelled and sat straight up in the bed. “I forgot to give Jonas her gift from me. Now she hasn’t gotten it, and she must think I didn’t give her anything just because I didn’t go to the party.”

  Tears began to swell.

  “What did you buy her?” asked Camilla.

  She ran her fingers through his hair.

  “The new Beyoncé CD, and now it’s lying at home on my desk.”

  For a moment, he sat staring blankly at Camilla, and she started to get the feeling it was all her fault.

  “We’ll buy something over here and send it back to her. Don’t you think she’d like to have a gift from here?”

  He sat a while with his eyes on the commercials flashing across the screen, then he nodded and leaned back.

  11

  Louise recognized the chief physician from a distance. He stood outside Reception and talked with a nurse and one of the trauma center’s other doctors, whom she also knew from the night when Jonas and Camilla were admitted after the shooting in Sweden. In the days that followed, he’d come to her department daily to hear how it was going with them.

  Louise greeted them and apologized for breaking into their conversation. She ignored the nurse, who was obviously irritated by the interruption.

  “I’ve just come from Svanemølle Harbor,” she said and told them how she’d arrived at the accident immediately after Signe was run over. “Jonas was at the party. He’s in the same class as the girl.”

  That last comment was addressed to the two doctors, who knew the boy.

  The chief physician nodded to the others and asked Louise to follow him down the hall to his office.

  When they got there, the door stood open. They stepped inside, and he closed the door behind them.

  “How bad is it?” asked Louise. “I promised her mother I’d come in.”

  He pointed to the guest chair and pulled his own chair back from the crowded desk. His eyes were bright gray under his blond hair, which hung down across his forehead. A deep wrinkle was etched across the bridge of his nose.

  “Signe Fasting-Thomsen has just been declared dead,” he said with a sad look.

  Louise leaned back, folded her hands behind her neck, and closed her eyes.

  “Oh, no. That can’t be!”

  The happy, red-haired girl smiled in Louise’s memory of her, standing outside the sailing club as guests arrived. It was only a few hours ago.

  “Her mother’s been wheeled into ICU. One of our doctors is examining her now to determine the extent of her injuries. We’re waiting to take her into X-ray, so we can see if any facial bones are broken. That could easily be the case. It looks like she was kicked in both the face and the back. At any rate, she has intense bruising over her lower back, which couldn’t have come from just a fall.”

  Louise dropped her hands.

  “Does she know that her daughter died?” she asked.

  The chief physician shook his head. They sat a while in silence.

  When he stood up and walked to the door, Louise followed him.

  “What about the father?” she asked. “Has he come?”

  “He’s on his way. Drove as soon as he heard what had happened.”

  “It’s quite a distance from Odsherred. Are you waiting for him before you talk with Britt?”

  The doctor nodded.

  “Yes, I think they should be together when they find out. He doesn’t know anything yet, either, only that his daughter’s condition was critical when she was brought in.”

  They walked down the hall toward the ICU.

  Louise felt her cell phone vibrate and read the brief text that Jonas had sent her.

  “Anything new?” it said.

  “Not yet. Sleep well, sweetheart. Good night,” she texted him back.

  She couldn’t have been more evasive, and her conscience gnawed at her.

  It was nearly midnight. In the sofa lounge outside the unit where Britt lay and waited to be taken to X-ray, the young officer from the harbor sat with a health magazine in his lap. His eyes drifted across its pages. On the table in front of him, there was a plastic cup with a drop of coffee in the bottom.

  “The father’s on his way,” he said when he saw Louise.

  “How much have you told him?” she asked.

  He tossed the magazine aside.

  “That it looks serious. We didn’t know anything more at that point. But I’ll stay till he comes.”

  Louise’s body felt heavy as she settled down next to him. Signe’s face began to stand out in her mind. For a while she sat slouched over, trying to get her feelings in check so she could focus on the accident.

  “Have any witnesses shown up? Anyone who saw what happened down at the harbor?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What about the guy with the ponytail who ran after Signe? Anyone see him?”

  “Nope. And the married couple in the moving van didn’t see anyone. Only the girl, when she was suddenly in front of their vehicle.”

  “Jonas saw him running after her.”

  The officer nodded.

  Louise gave him her card, even though Jonas had already given his name and number to the officers down at the sailing club.

  “We’ll continue with the interviews tomorrow,” he said and stuck her card in his pocket. “Wouldn’t a lot of people go down to a harbor like that on a Sunday morning? Maybe we’ll luck out and find that some of them were there last night and noticed the boys before they reached the sailing club.”

  Just then the double doors clicked open and the nurse Louise had seen when she’d arrived now escorted Ulrik in. He looked shocked and pale, as if his face were frozen, his eyes blank. For a second, it looked like he was going to stop when he caught sight of Louise, but then with a long stride he followed the nurse, who held the door for him, and disappeared down a long hallway.

  Louise fought down the lump that had gathered in her throat. Then she stood up.

  “I’d appreciate it if you kept me informed,” she told the officer. “Mostly so I know what to say to the children in the class, when they ask.”

  Feeling cold inside, she walked down the brightly lit hallway. Nurses and doctors came in and out of the rooms. It was the week’s busiest shift: Saturday night.

  Louise walked with her hands in her jacket pockets and her eyes on the floor, thoughts wrestling in her head.

  Meaningless. Utterly pointless. How could a children’s party end like that?

  She wasn’t sure how she’d manage to tell Jonas that Signe was dead. Let alone how she’d explain to him that the police presumably wouldn’t punish the guilty party. If it turned out there w
eren’t any witnesses to the accident, then charges for involuntary manslaughter would never be brought. And what would that do anyhow, she thought as she pushed the door open. It still wouldn’t change the fact that it had been a tragic accident.

  12

  The next days were interminable. After Louise dropped off the report of her interview with Mie Hartmann late Sunday morning, she drove to Lasse’s parents’ house to pick up Jonas. The boys were still in their pajamas, their faces frozen as she told them as gently as she could the unvarnished version of the tragedy, as they all sat around the kitchen table with a basket of rolls and morning papers spread out in sections.

  There was nothing encouraging she could soften it with. No hope that it would end well or get better with time. Signe was dead. She’d never get to go to Saint Anne’s, and at the beginning that’s what occupied Jonas and Lasse the most.

  “She’d been looking forward to it so much!” they said with voices full of sadness.

  And after that the questions came tumbling out: Was she dead at the scene? Did it hurt her? Was she afraid? Was there a lot of blood? What about the guy who ran after her? Did the driver see him?

  The two adults asked more discreetly after Signe’s parents. Namely Britt, but also Ulrik, who’d received the terrifying call that all parents dread.

  Louise wasn’t sure how long she’d been answering questions when suddenly they ebbed away.

  Words were replaced with silence, which gave her the opportunity to excuse herself and to thank Lasse’s parents for taking care of Jonas.

  * * *

  The weather was good as they walked out onto the sidewalk and looked up at the Planetarium. Lasse’s parents had an apartment on Peblinge Dosseringen, and the sun threw a golden glare across the lake that made Jonas squint his eyes.

  They walked home. The shops along Gammel Kongevej were closed like they would be on any other lazy Sunday morning. As they neared the Frederiksberg Town Hall, Louise suggested a cup of hot chocolate at Belis Kitchen, but Jonas wanted to go home.