The Running Girl

by Sara Blaedel

  Up on the fourth floor, Jón’s mother stood on the stairs and received her. Vigdís Ólafsdóttir was short, with a slightly pinched but pretty face, her lips painted red in contrast to her blond hair and intense, penetratingly blue eyes. There was something about her that made Louise think of the myths about The Hidden People, who meant so much in Icelandic superstition that people literally believed they could bring a halt to building activities that disturbed nature.

  There was nothing supernatural about Vigdís Ólafsdóttir; she merely invited Louise into her large kitchen and said that her son and his friends were in his room.

  “They’re so depressed,” she said sadly and told her they were on their way to see Sebastian’s father in New Harbor. “He’s holding a small gathering for all the friends later in the afternoon.”

  Loud, thumping rhythms spilled through the boy’s door, and Louise heard someone’s voice and the clinking of bottles penetrate the solid sound barrier.

  She followed the mother, who walked over and knocked on the door.

  The room was thick with smoke. Thomas Jørgensen, the boy who’d kicked Britt and broken her cheekbone, sat on the floor. His eyes were red, and it must have been many hours since he was sober.

  Slowly he turned his gaze toward Louise, then just stared at her without focusing. His shirt sleeves were pushed up, and black tattoo lines played over his arms when he flexed and unflexed the muscles, like a bad habit he no longer even noticed himself doing.

  Jón sat on the bed, and beside him was Kenneth Thim, who Louise hadn’t met before. Each of them had a beer bottle in hand and a joint between their fingers. They were more than a little drunk, and the sweet smell of marijuana hung in the air.

  Louise couldn’t say she blamed them. They’d been clobbered and were out of commission. No one should have been in that damned boathouse, and maybe it crossed their minds that it could just as easily have been them sleeping it off down there, even though they’d been forbidden.

  Jón’s mother looked a little uneasy and shrugged her shoulders apologetically, but Louise walked in and shut the door behind her.

  Green gas can. None of them knew anything about it. She sat a bit and let her eyes roam. What had she expected? That they’d straight away confess to burning down the boathouse, not knowing that their friends were in there sleeping?

  “Do any of you know Nick Hartmann?” she asked, then explained that he was the one who rented space in the warehouse next to the boathouse.

  Thomas Jørgensen popped open another beer. He leaned his neck back so his head rested against the wall, then concentrated his look on Louise, as if he’d only realized she was there when she’d started to talk again.

  No one said anything.

  “Have you seen anyone come down to the warehouse?”

  She looked at them and gauged where she had the best chance of getting through. At first, Jón seemed to be the soberest one, but on the other hand he looked to be the most stoned—his pupils were tiny and his head hung down.

  The boys sat in silence, close to what Louise would describe as unreachable. They shook their heads. Didn’t know anything about anything. Hadn’t seen anyone and knew nothing.

  “Someone set fire to your clubhouse,” she said in a new effort to get through. “The fire didn’t break out on its own—it was set. And the person who did it will presumably be charged with double homicide. I take it you’re at least as interested in finding out who that person is, so the concerned party can be punished.”

  “I’ll bash the psychopath, if you just find him,” said Thomas Jørgensen from down on the floor.

  To illustrate what he meant, he reached out for an iron pipe that was in the corner and started beating the air with it. But it was heavy and tumbled from him when he tried to switch hands. When it fell, it made a clanging noise and left a mark in the floor.

  Louise didn’t doubt he meant what he’d said.

  “But there’s no damned way for us to find out who it is,” she said, “unless you tell us who you’ve seen come down to the harbor!”

  There passed a brief moment while they looked around the circle at each other, as if to decide how much to say. Again, it was Thomas Jørgensen who took the lead.

  “Who the hell comes there?” he asked mostly to himself, trying to tune in and order his thoughts. “Well, uh, there’s that Arab-looking guy with the slanty eyes,” he said. “And now and then some of the ones Nymann knows from The Castle. But they only go to the warehouse, not to us.”

  The others nodded, and Kenneth Thim leaned forward a little to contribute.

  “And then there are the ones who come help with the loading, when they’ve got trucks down there,” he slurred, too drunk to talk straight.

  He stopped, as if he’d suddenly forgotten what Louise had asked about, then gathered up the threads again.

  “But you gotta understand! We couldn’t see shit because of where they pulled up. They went in down at the other end, so there was no way in hell we could see who else might have been there.”

  He looked around sluggishly at the others, as if he were waiting for their approval for having put the police in their place.

  Louise ignored him.

  “Arab-looking guy?” she asked. “Who’s that?”

  “The one who had all his shit in there,” Jón blurted.

  He looked at his wristwatch and got on his feet unsteadily.

  Arab-looking apparently covered anyone with dark, non-white features—even if their ancestors hailed from Greenland.

  “So, I take it you also know that he’s the one who was shot?”

  They nodded curtly, and Jón walked over to his desk where there was a pile of coats hanging over the back of the chair.

  “Time to clear out,” he said and looked at the others. He turned his eyes to Louise, and there was an undertone of apology when he explained that they were meeting at the café in New Harbor.

  He put a jacket on.

  “When you say ‘The Castle’ I take it you mean the bikers’ clubhouse? Not Christiansborg,” she said and prepared to let them go.

  Kenneth Thim gave a little grunt of dry laughter.

  “Damned straight. You think the Parliament dummies go to such nice places?”

  He sat laughing at himself, until Jón tossed a short leather jacket to him and the sleeve struck him in the face and knocked glowing ash off his joint.

  “Watch out, dammit!” he yelled and with hectic arm movements managed to get the ash off the bedcovers and onto the floor, where he stomped it out with his shoe, so it left behind a black burn mark in the parquet. “What the hell are you doing, your usual tricks?”

  He looked up angrily.

  “Let’s just get going,” said Jón and got Thomas Jørgensen pulled up off the floor.

  Louise looked at Thim and guessed that most of the time he lived in a fog of booze, smoke, and pills. Whatever would keep him in his own little make-believe world, where he staggered around and only played by his own rules.

  Thoroughly unsympathetic and unbalanced, thought Louise, as she made room for the boys to squeeze out of the room. She was still standing in the door to the bedroom when the front door slammed behind them, and they made noise stumbling around in the stairwell.

  Vigdís Ólafsdóttir came over from the living room and looked at Louise, as if she should excuse their behavior.

  “They just can’t understand that their friends aren’t here anymore. It’s about as tragic as it gets,” she said and pulled out a chair from the dining table and sat down. “I know it might not look like it, but inside they’re just big boys.”

  Louise refrained from commenting. Instead she pulled a chair out for herself and sat across from the mother.

  “Do you think it’s possible they set fire to the boathouse themselves, as revenge for not being able to use it anymore? Of course, without knowing their friends were inside.”

  The Icelandic woman quickly shook her head, making her blond hair flutter.
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  “They’d never do that. Besides, they’ve been allowed to set up in the loft in the property where Sebastian’s dad has his café. He owns the whole property, and they’ve been given two or three rooms, so they already have a new place. When they were thrown out, they drove all their things there. Now they just need to paint and straighten it up a little. They haven’t gone out to hurt anyone.”

  There was hardly anything left of her Icelandic accent, only a faint tone under the words.

  Louise took a deep breath.

  “Do you know if your son and his friends associate with members of a biker club?” she asked and observed the woman.

  Vigdís dropped her eyes and evidently thought about it. A moment later, she looked up again and with clear blue eyes nodded.

  “Some of them do, I think. At any rate, Nymann, who died this weekend. He knew several of them and tried to get the others to function as a kind of support-operation, or whatever it’s called. But Jón wouldn’t—thank God he’s smart enough to think about who’s worth hanging out with.”

  Louise thought about it and wondered how much the Icelandic mother knew about her son’s friends already being written up in the police crime registry. Some parents have an incredible ability to deny that their children are up to things they’d rather not know about. And it was easiest on all sides, until it reached a point where it was too late to help them through loving care and attention.

  She herself had been on a murder case involving a young man who’d been stabbed in the middle of Copenhagen’s main pedestrian street, and it later turned out that one of the culprits behind the utterly meaningless attack came from a “well-situated and proper family.” However much those words meant. Lack of attention and responsibility for one’s teenager could, as she saw it, lead to as much shit as a bad childhood.

  Louise thanked her host and picked up her bag from the floor. She gave the Icelandic woman her card and said she hoped they’d soon be a little further with their investigation of the fire.

  Down on the street, she called Willumsen. He’d left her three messages while she’d been sitting and talking with the friends of the two deceased. He answered after a single ring, but Louise took the lead before he was able to.

  “I’ve just spoken with three of the friends of the deceased, and they say they’ve seen Nick Hartmann down at the warehouse with several members of the biker club. And that’s despite the bikers’ spokesman stubbornly insisting that they don’t know anything about him.”

  Louise spoke so rapidly that he couldn’t interrupt her.

  “They came down to the warehouse with him,” she elaborated. “We need to talk with them again.”

  The second she finished talking, Willumsen’s voice thundered in her ear.

  “You just see about getting your little-lady ass in here. Forget the bikers. It doesn’t make a shit-bit of difference now. Frandsen just called and said his techs are finished with the black Golf from out on Strandvænget, and the tires match to a tee the tire prints that were taken down at Svanemølle Harbor outside the boathouse. We’ve arrested Britt Fasting-Thomsen, and sometime in the next couple of hours she’ll be charged with arson and double homicide.”

  38

  Louise, what in the hell! Britt hasn’t killed anyone.”

  Camilla had driven off to the side and parked on the shoulder. She had the car in neutral and the emergency brake on. It was almost midnight in Denmark, and she could hear that Louise was tired.

  Over here it was just past noon. Markus sat in the passenger seat and looked out the side window at a California vineyard, where the vines were allowed to grow taller than the French vintners permitted. The ground was reddish and well-tended with small tilled rows to keep the soil loose and free of weeds.

  But Camilla wasn’t looking in that direction. The last hour they’d driven through Napa Valley on their trip to San Francisco, but while she kept her eyes on the road, her thoughts were back home in Denmark. It was Ulrik who’d sent the brief text. Just that his wife had been arrested earlier that day, and not until the evening had the police charged her with the boathouse fire that had cost two boys their lives.

  She couldn’t understand it and had tried to catch Louise on her cell phone, but it was only now that she’d finally answered, and Camilla could feel how the anger was about to replace the frustration that had first blazed up. She got hold of herself so she wouldn’t raise her voice.

  “Now just listen,” she said with a forced and somewhat restrained calm that made her words sound curt. “Britt couldn’t kill someone. She doesn’t have it in her.”

  “Her car’s been at the harbor,” Louise interrupted, and Camilla could hear her yawning, but she didn’t care, to put it mildly. Right now, she was so angry that she sat clinging to the steering wheel with her free hand to keep it from shaking.

  “She has no alibi. Can’t remember what she did, except slept, or as she put it, ‘lay and stared up in the air,’ after Flemming and I left her around five thirty,” Louise continued. “That’s not good enough. Not at all when we’ve found a gas can that’s the same kind the technicians found left behind at the fire site. Britt keeps insisting that she doesn’t know anything about it, even though it was in the back of her car.”

  Camilla let her talk, but no longer listened. She could see Signe’s mom in her mind, the fine facial features and her neatly trimmed straight hair.

  “It’s possible,” she said when Louise was silent. “But she hasn’t been down to the harbor to avenge Signe’s death.”

  She could hear that Louise wanted to interrupt. In the rearview mirror, she saw a gigantic tractor trailer barreling toward her at a high speed with headlights and lamps that made it look like a high-rise apartment building on wheels. The car vibrated when it passed by, making the dust on Highway 80 lift into a dense cloud before settling back down and revealing the long, straight road.

  “That’s not how she thinks,” Camilla said. “I could do it. Actually, I have no doubt I’d consider revenge if it was Markus. If someone had chased him out in front of a car, and he’d been killed like Signe, then I’m sure I’d find a way to do it. And sorry for saying it, but I wouldn’t give a shit about spending sixteen years behind bars in a situation like that. I wouldn’t have anything left anyway…except that it might soothe my grief knowing they weren’t allowed to continue living, either.”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Louise interrupted, irritated with her. Her voice suddenly came through more clearly.

  “Yes, I sure would. But Britt wouldn’t. She doesn’t have that anger in her, and that’s what makes the difference.”

  “Come on,” said Louise, and the distance between them became clearer from the tone of her voice, which had risen to a professional manner. Their friendship was pushed into the background. “I hear what you’re saying, and I understand you.”

  Camilla straightened up in the car’s wide leather seat as anger shot through her.

  “But you also need to understand that we’re conducting a murder investigation,” Louise continued before she could say anything, “a double homicide at that, and so it’s not enough that you call home from your vacation trip and say that it couldn’t be your friend who did it. We need a little more evidence on the table; and for starters, it would be nice if Britt began to help some herself as we try to get a handle on what she was doing the night the fire broke out.”

  Camilla wanted to say something, but instead she hung up her cell phone. Discouraged, she let it rest in her hand and felt empty and far away. Too far away to do anything for Britt. She came to think of John Bro. The star lawyer she’d run into several times as a journalist for Morgenavisen. He was outrageously expensive, but he won his cases. She found Ulrik’s last message to her and sent him his name and the address of his firm on Bredgade.

  “Did Signe’s mom kill someone?” asked Markus, who hadn’t said a word during her conversation with Louise. He hadn’t even asked her to say hello for him, so she knew he’d sense
d that something had happened that wasn’t good.

  “Of course not, but the police suspect her of setting fire to a place where two of the boys who ruined Signe’s party were lying asleep.”

  She turned and looked at him. There was something far-off in his look, as if everything had happened too close together and was too painful for him to process.

  “We might need to go back home,” she said and reached out and took his hand.

  He sat for a moment without reacting, then turned to her and nodded. It was almost a month early, according to the plans they’d made, but Camilla knew that she wouldn’t get anything more out of the trip if Britt was jailed for homicide without her doing something to help her. If they scratched the rest of the trip, at least she’d be able to visit her.

  She put the car into drive and swung out. There were still two and a half hours of driving to San Francisco. They should find a place for lunch, and after that she’d have to call home to the travel agency and get their plane tickets changed.

  Her cell phone beeped again. It was a text from Ulrik.

  “We have a lawyer, but thanks. Have just spoken with Frederik, he’d like to see you, but won’t be back until the weekend, sending the address. Best, Ulrik.”

  * * *

  Camilla drove and kept her eye out for a diner or gas station, so they could at least get a sandwich and something to drink.

  Her thoughts whirled.

  It surprised her that Frederik Sachs-Smith had so quickly agreed to a visit, but she was still deeply shaken over the arrest back home, and that fact dampened her enthusiasm for an in-house interview. On the other hand—if she got his version of the family scandal, she could sell it to Morgenavisen and cover at least one of the tickets home.

  She shook her head. She could also just screw the interview. If she went home now, they wouldn’t have to spend money on hotels and food, but she had sublet her apartment and would have to find someplace else to live during the time they’d planned on being away.