The Running Girl

by Sara Blaedel

  “They were here again. They say Nick’s cheated them and owes them so much money that I’ll have to sell the duplex. If not, they’ll take Cecilie the next time they come.”

  Nick Hartmann’s young widow cried so loudly that Louise had to hold the phone away from her ear.

  “When were they there?” she asked, quickly setting aside her grumpy tone.

  “Just now. They just left. They came in a big box van and took a whole bunch of our things. The TV, stereo system…”

  Mie cried again, making her words indecipherable.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” she finally got out.

  In the background, the baby started to screech.

  “Stay there a little longer. I’m on my way out to you.”

  She didn’t need to ask who’d paid her the visit. Louise could imagine. Tønnes had gotten his men to react quickly. She was sure it was learning that the furniture had been confiscated—so the value it represented was now in the possession of the police—that had triggered the reaction. It was foolish of her not to foresee that it might turn out this way. Irresponsible.

  She took her jacket and flew out the door again. Melvin and Jonas still sat out on the stairs with Dina. Another neighbor had joined them, and the deaf puppy wagged its tail and lapped up all the attention that was given to it.

  Louise pulled Jonas aside.

  “I need to head out for about an hour. I put 100 kroner on the kitchen table, so you can get a pizza if you’re hungry before I get back, but I won’t be later than eight o’clock.”

  Jonas nodded and stood there sheepishly.

  She reached out her hand and laid it on his arm.

  “We need to talk together, but it’ll have to wait until I come home.”

  He nodded, and she hurried down the stairs, knowing full well that she’d left him back there with a load of thoughts and uncertainty. It was both mean and unfair, she knew that well, but more than anything else she needed to get control over her own thoughts before they got started on a conversation that would have a great deal of meaning for Jonas’s future.

  * * *

  The windows in the duplex on Dyvekes Allé had been replaced and the police’s cordon tape taken away. Through the kitchen window, she could see Mie with her daughter in her arms. She’d stood watching for Louise, and the door was opened before she made it all the way down the front walk. Mie’s eyes were gray with blurred mascara and red from crying.

  “What happened?” Louise asked as she came in.

  “Two of them came. They barged right in and forced me into the living room with them.”

  “Were they the same ones who came before?”

  “Not the ones who were here in the afternoon. But then I didn’t see who came at night.”

  Louise pulled out a kitchen chair for Mie and asked her to sit down. She sat across from her and told her that the police had reason to believe that Nick had gotten himself involved with the bikers, and that their business relations could have led to the shooting.

  “Do you know anything about their connection?”

  It looked like the woman thought about it, but her eyes were vacant.

  “He didn’t, at any rate, tell me about it,” she answered and shook her head. “But the ones who were just here could be that type.”

  Louise nodded.

  “What do you know about the furniture he kept down at Svanemølle Harbor?”

  “Nothing. I already said that.”

  She started to cry again.

  Louise looked at the baby, who’d fallen asleep over her mother’s shoulder.

  “Couldn’t we put her down to sleep?” she suggested, nodding toward the living room and bedroom.

  Mie stood up and took her daughter to her crib.

  “They said they were filing a claim for between six and ten million kroner. But if I agreed to pay them voluntarily, then they’d make a settlement, so I wouldn’t be dragged into court, and that way I could get by with paying them just four million of what Nick owed.”

  Louise shook her head, impressed by how quickly Tønnes had gotten a lawyer to formulate an agreement. It was well-known to the police that the bikers had lawyers, accountants, and other professional folks on their payroll, to take care of just this sort of thing. The henchmen they sent out to collect the valuables weren’t in a position to formulate matters like that on their own.

  Interesting, she thought. Four million came pretty close to what Nick Hartmann had paid for one of the two containers with fake designer furniture, and the demand on Mie confirmed that he hadn’t pulled the money out of his own pockets. The way the situation had unfolded, the people who’d invested the money now sat back without being able to demand either the money or the furniture, and Louise could easily see how that could make the backers do whatever they had to to get their tab covered.

  “I think it’s wisest if you move away for the time being. Is there someplace you can stay?”

  Mie nodded absently.

  “We can stay with my mom. That’s where we went the other time.”

  Louise shook her head.

  “That’s not good enough, too easy to find you there.”

  “Do you think they mean it? That they’d come and take Cecilie from me if I don’t pay?”

  There was a closed-in smell in the kitchen, as if nothing had been opened since they’d moved back in. The candlesticks on the table had burned down, but the stumps were still in their holders. Here, too, a death had put life on hold, exactly as it had for Signe’s parents, Louise thought as she looked around. But for Mie it wasn’t over with yet—fear was hanging over her head.

  “I can’t pay them,” she exclaimed and made a desperate gesture with her hands. “It’s completely nuts with all that money, and I don’t even know if I could sell the duplex. Don’t you think it’s just something they’re saying?”

  “No,” Louise said and shook her head. “I’m afraid there’s reason for you to be scared, that they mean it seriously. You need to be out of here by this evening.”

  “But what about all the furniture he had? Can’t they just have it?” she asked, not seeming to understand.

  In theory, yes, thought Louise, but it’s not that simple.

  “To begin with, we don’t know if they own any of it. They certainly won’t tell us if the furniture was bought with their money. But in this instance, they’ll wind up suffering a big economic loss. That’s what they don’t want to happen. They can’t get hold of the furniture that’s been seized because it’s going next to SKAT, where it’ll be confiscated since it’s illegal to import copied goods from China. So, you’re the only one they can hand the bill to for what they’ve lost.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  Mie nodded heavily, but didn’t seem to understand that there was no way to take her out of the picture. She sat that way a while, then turned her eyes to Louise.

  “I just don’t understand how it can have anything to do with Nick, and how they can come and demand a bunch of money when he’s dead?”

  Louise kept herself from smiling.

  “I can only guess,” she said and asked if she could get herself some water.

  Mie nodded and pointed to a kitchen cupboard.

  “We don’t have any proof of it yet, but we’re working on it. My guess is that Nick started a business with someone who was willing to throw a considerable sum of money into the enterprise. Then your darling earned a nice bit for his part of the work, but it was the investor who earned the big money.”

  “Who?”

  “Could be criminals who’ve been at it for years, and maybe earlier they earned large sums selling drugs. It could be that they no longer think it’s so attractive to involve themselves in criminal businesses with high risk. Such as drugs, for example, where sentences are relatively severe. And so, they’ve switched over to something where the penalty is more lenient, but the earnings are almost just as high. A safer choice, you could say.”

  “But then it’s not
the bikers, if they’re old?”

  “Yes, it easily could be. The ones who’ve been in it a long time are getting into their midfifties. And they might not want to run the risk of long prison sentences.”

  “But the ones who came here weren’t old.”

  It looked as though Mie had stopped trying to follow what she was saying and, honestly, Louise didn’t care if she understood.

  “Are you packing a bag?”

  Mie nodded and stood up.

  “Have you thought about where you’re going?”

  “I’m going to a girlfriend’s. But what about all the stuff they took with them?”

  “First it needs to be reported, and then I’ll have a couple of criminal technicians out here so we can see if they’ve left fingerprints. How much did they take?”

  “You can see in there.”

  Louise went into the living room. It was easy enough to spot what had vanished. The most expensive and at the same time easiest to sell. She skipped an inspection. Called instead to Frandsen, who was having dinner but took his time and said he’d send someone out there that evening.

  Mie had packed and put Cecilie in a carrier with a flowered, baby-soft blanket draped over it. Louise held the door and took the bags.

  “Call if you feel in any way threatened,” she said as she stood out in front of the house and Mie locked it behind them. With a bag in each hand, Louise followed her to the garage where Nick kept his cars, the convertible with the beige top and the dark blue Mercedes that he usually drove around in. That was the one that Mie carefully set Cecilie in, and Louise thought that before long it might be seized, once they’d gotten a sense of how large her husband’s earnings had been from the illegal furniture import.

  She remained standing on the sidewalk and watched the widow and her little child, as the dark blue Mercedes drove up toward Englandsvej on its way to northern Zealand, where Mie’s girlfriend lived on a farm.

  43

  I was not down at the harbor on Thursday evening. I have never been in the boathouse; I didn’t even know my husband owned anything down there.”

  Britt had said no to coffee when she was driven in from Vestre Prison to a new interrogation.

  She sat, looking pale, but managed to nod when Louise offered her a cup of tea instead.

  “The problem is that we have so many things that point to your being down there,” Louise said, looking at Britt.

  “Circumstantial evidence can’t be used for anything,” Nikolaj Lassen interrupted loudly.

  “We’re not talking about circumstantial evidence in this instance,” Louise corrected. “We have a handful of very clear and concrete proof and…”

  She looked at Britt.

  “What we have is enough to find you guilty on the charges we made against you.”

  Britt nodded.

  Before they’d seated themselves in the office, Britt’s lawyer had pulled Louise aside and whispered to her.

  “My client has asked if you could visit her in prison, off the record. It’s OK with me, if we can agree that you don’t discuss the case. And if something does come up that might be relevant, then you’d write that into the report. What do you say about that?”

  Louise had nodded. Had earlier made that sort of agreement with lawyers to work together if something came up. And she wanted to go by Vestre Prison and talk a little informally about everything except the fire. She could always hope to leave with something relevant.

  “You maintain that you’ve never been down to the boathouse?”

  Louise spoke calmly and in a soft voice. Already at the start of the interrogation, the lawyer had admitted that he wasn’t in a position to bring forward anything that proved his client’s innocence. In other words, nothing had turned up to confirm she was telling the truth.

  “I’ve never been to that part of the harbor,” Britt said. “Only to the sailing clubs.”

  “Did you notice that your car was missing over the course of Thursday evening, when the fire broke out?”

  “No,” she said and shook her head patiently. “Most of the time, I slept upstairs, as I explained earlier.”

  Every answer was vague and circular.

  “How would somebody get hold of your keys, if it wasn’t you who drove the car to the harbor that evening?”

  Britt Fasting-Thomsen shrugged her shoulders and shook her head—she didn’t know. Maybe she’d left them in the car.

  “Wouldn’t you have noticed if someone had gone into your yard and taken firewood?”

  Now the lawyer leaned forward.

  “Anyone could have gone into the yard without my client noticing it,” he said with conviction in his voice. “Damn it, she’s taking sleeping pills to shut the world out. Anyone could have taken her car. Anyone could have gone into the house, if they’d wanted to. It’s not certain that my client remembered to lock the front door.”

  He paused briefly and emptied his cup before continuing.

  “You need to understand that my client has lost her grip,” he said and looked from Louise to Thomas Toft. “She takes sleeping pills and sedatives; she’s no longer that attentive. She doesn’t notice details and changes. She has enough to do just getting through the great tragedy that’s struck her.”

  His artistic pause was wanton, followed by a theatrical collapse in his chair and a sigh of resignation.

  “In fact, someone could have lain in bed beside her without her noticing it,” he said. “But that doesn’t make her guilty of the charges against her.”

  “You’ll just need to prove that to us,” Louise said, irritated at his taking the obvious route.

  “No,” he suddenly yelled with renewed strength in his voice and banged his hand on the table. “It’s damned well you who have to prove that she was at the harbor that night. Not me who needs to disprove it!”

  Louise raised an eyebrow and looked over at Toft, who’d stayed quiet during most of the interrogation.

  “That’s exactly what we’ve already done,” he said and turned his gaze to Britt.

  “We’ll end up sitting like this many more times in the days to come,” he said and nodded pensively. “If you have anything at all to add that would point in some other direction, then it would spare you from having to go through these same motions.”

  “I have nothing to add,” Britt said quietly and stood up when her lawyer nodded toward the door.

  44

  There was a pool in their hotel in Santa Barbara, and the sun was shining warmly even though it had gotten well into October. On the other side of the street was a wide sandy beach and wavy blue water, but the sea spray was a little too heavy to invite swimming, so Markus had immediately set his sights on the lounge chairs and the swimming pool. There weren’t any other guests interested in soaking up sun, and there were clean towels on a little table at the entrance to the pool area.

  They had two hours before they had to leave. Camilla had already located Frederik Sachs-Smith’s house on a map and punched the address into the car’s GPS. Twenty minutes with normal traffic. At the hotel’s reception, they’d let her print out all the articles she’d found online in Danish newspapers about the family scandal, and now she took the stack with her to the pool, along with a cup of coffee and a soft drink for Markus.

  As she saw it, the family’s eldest son had always kept himself out of the jet set. He’d gotten a degree in film studies at the University of Copenhagen, but not much more than that had come up when she’d searched for him. There was a bit in the business sections about his real estate investments.

  Each of the three siblings had received 10 million kroner on the day they turned eighteen, and they’d gotten another large monetary gift when they’d turned twenty-five. She hadn’t been able to find the amount, but reading between the lines it must have been substantial. Unlike his siblings, who’d lived life in the fast lane with a lot of flair, expensive habits, and luxury cars, Frederik had as far as she could tell managed his millions sensibly by invest
ing in real estate, and at a time when housing prices were low.

  In one of the public records she’d found on his Danish enterprise, the worth of his properties totaled just under two hundred million—and on top of that there were the profits from his foreign investments. Frederik Sachs-Smith still owned a portion of Termo-Lux, but he no longer needed the family’s fortune. He’d long ago made his own.

  An hour later, the coffee was drunk and the papers smelled faintly of her sweaty hands. She’d been in the water twice, but only for short dips. Markus, on the other hand, spent almost the whole time in the water and felt like he hadn’t gotten enough swim time when she told him it was time to go.

  * * *

  They drove south along the coast and looked at people who played beach volleyball or skated in the bike lane. The car windows were rolled down, and the wind grabbed hold of Camilla’s blond hair and flung it in her face. She pushed her sunglasses onto her forehead to keep it somewhat in place and out of her eyes.

  The road twisted and grew smaller. Wind tossed the palms, and she’d already noticed when they’d arrived in town the previous day that there was a relaxed, vacation-like atmosphere around here. Even though this was precisely the one place on their long travels where she was not on vacation.

  After the interview, she’d planned on continuing to Los Angeles, but now she suddenly felt that they deserved a couple of days in Santa Barbara, lounging by the pool, driving around the city and out to the famous pier that stretched like a branch out into the water and oozed with atmosphere from the restaurants and small shops.

  “Turn right,” droned the mechanical female voice. “Turn right.”

  The gate was wrought iron, and she had to step out of the car to reach the button on the intercom. But as soon as she introduced herself, the gate slid open.

  * * *

  He stood on the stairs in a white shirt that hung down over his long shorts, which came down to his knees. His medium-length blond hair was held out of his face by a pair of sunglasses pushed onto his forehead. Two small dogs stood beside him yapping, so Camilla decided not to drive all the way up to the front door. Instead, she parked beside a tall flowering hedge that ran along the fence between his and his neighbor’s property.