The Running Girl

by Sara Blaedel

  Up on the third, Melvin stood at his door and met her.

  “Jonas and the dog are in here. Come on in.”

  She was glad to be led into his grandfatherly living room, where she was parked at the dining table. He took out a thin glass and poured her a stiff one.

  Jonas didn’t say a word. He sat on the sofa with Dina at his feet. She was the only one entirely unscathed by the shock that had turned Jonas pale and made Melvin reach for the shot glasses.

  “That was something, huh?” Louise said, trying to smile happily at the boy.

  He got up and came over and put his arms around her. He had to bend over, and it turned out to be a little awkward. The lump in his throat made it hard for him to speak.

  “Think, if you’d been in it!” he whispered.

  Louise pulled back a little, so she could look up at him.

  “Then it wouldn’t have happened,” she said and cleared her throat.

  Melvin sat down on a chair across from them.

  “It was only to get a scare. There’s no reason to be really afraid,” she said, shaking off their concern so she wouldn’t catch it herself. “But now we’re also without a car.”

  “Can’t you just use my dad’s? It’s still up in Sweden,” he said earnestly. “OK, it’s not a Saab, but a Citroën.”

  She smiled at him. Henrik Holm’s estate hadn’t been settled yet, and she hadn’t interested herself in it, just received regular payments from the pastor’s lawyer to help cover the extra expenses she’d had after Jonas moved in.

  “Is there someone we should notify about this, that is, over at Headquarters where you work?” asked Melvin.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “It might be a good idea if I tell my chief, just for the sake of protocol,” she said.

  She was suddenly aware that Jonas still held her.

  She turned a little and pulled him down onto her lap so she could put her arm around him. His body was warm and rested against her heavily. She could feel his rapid heartbeat against her underarm, and knew that he was in greater shock than he let on. She squeezed him a little tighter and drew him close, then whispered that it was all over with now and the police would find out who did it.

  A hackneyed phrase. Unless there’d been a witness, there wasn’t a chance in hell they’d find out who did it. And, in reality, it was mostly just what one said to calm other people down. She was fairly certain it was connected to Mie and her daughter being moved from their house. The bikers felt the police breathing down their necks, and they didn’t like it.

  She nodded gratefully when Melvin offered her another shot, then called Suhr at home, disturbing him in the middle of evening coffee.

  When they came up after having taken Dina on an evening walk around the neighborhood, the baked potatoes in the oven were completely dried out. She’d forgotten all about them when she’d offered to take the dog for a walk. But Jonas had wanted to go, too, and now it occurred to her that he didn’t want her to go alone. He wanted to be there to rescue her if the strangers came back.

  She kissed him on the cheek when they said good night, and refrained from saying anything about the puppy, which had slipped into bed with him.

  47

  It was 8:45 the next morning when Louise met with Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen at his home on Strandvænget. On her way into Headquarters, she’d called him and asked for ten minutes for what she’d called a brief update.

  He was still staying at a hotel in the city to avoid journalists. When Louise caught him on his cell phone, he apologized for his day being filled up with meetings and suggested they meet in the early morning, when he had to run by the house to pick up some papers he had on his desk.

  The garden path was covered with yellow leaves, and it was wet from last night’s rain. Ulrik had parked his big Audi out on the street instead of driving it to the carport, and everything about the house looked abandoned and darkened when Louise walked up and rang the bell.

  His suit was designer and the shirt underneath it white and freshly ironed. Well-groomed, like the first time she’d met him, thought Louise, even though the lines on his face seemed deeper, his chin more pronounced. He’s lost weight, she decided and followed him into the entryway, where a big pile of unread newspapers lay just inside the door.

  Ulrik pointed to the living room and asked her to follow him.

  “Should we make some coffee?” he asked, looking at her.

  “Not for my sake,” Louise said.

  She pulled out a chair from the long dining table and invited him to sit down.

  “How did you and Nick Hartmann come into contact with each other? Did you advertise that you had a warehouse for rent?” she asked.

  Ulrik shook his head.

  “I gave him lessons a few times. He was mostly into parachute diving, but wanted to try paragliding. He went to a couple of my weekend courses, and one of the times we got to talking about his needing space.”

  Louise took her pad out.

  “Did you know what he’d be using the warehouse for?” she asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m not interested in that sort of thing, as long as it’s not containers with hash or narcotics,” he said and smiled. “And I could see that it wasn’t.”

  She nodded.

  “You knew what he was storing there?”

  “Yes, furniture, but I’ve only been by a single time since he moved his things in. I pay a man to keep an eye out for me.”

  “What did you know about Nick and his business?”

  Ulrik leaned forward a little toward Louise.

  “I didn’t know much at all about him. I don’t about the renters in the other properties I own, either. I have caretakers and administrators who keep up with the individual leases. There are a couple of friends I’ve helped into an apartment, but otherwise there’s a law firm that’s responsible for the rents. The only thing I knew about Nick was that we had the same hobby.”

  “Did you know that he had connections in the biker scene?”

  A shadow passed over Ulrik’s face.

  “I had an idea, or rather I should say that it doesn’t surprise me,” he admitted. “He talked a little about it at one point, and the money had to come from somewhere. He had expensive cars and seemed to like to live with a lot of flair.”

  Louise waited for him to continue.

  “But, honestly, I don’t get myself mixed up in where people’s money comes from, as long as they can pay their rent,” he said. “He was a decent and steady guy with a respectable job in a large shipping firm. His circle of friends, and who’s in it, didn’t interest me.”

  She nodded a couple of times and changed the subject.

  “I’ve been informed that you have a lover. Is that so?”

  Ulrik scooted back in his chair and looked at her in surprise.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Do you have a relationship with another woman?” she repeated.

  “Why?” asked Ulrik. “Why are you asking that?”

  “Because,” Louise said, “I’d like to have a complete picture of everything that relates to you and your family. I want to know everything. Nick Hartmann was shot down, and the motive might be related to the things he was storing in your warehouse. Not long afterward, that same warehouse burned down.”

  “The boathouse burned down,” Ulrik corrected. “And according to the charges you’ve made against my wife, there is a motive for it.”

  “Who’s the woman you introduced as your wife when you visited Sachs-Smith in July last year?”

  His face fell a bit. He sighed and his body slouched.

  It was obvious that he was thinking it over before he said anything. Pros and cons were being considered with lightning speed in his mind.

  “It’s true that I’ve had a relationship with another woman,” he admitted and glanced at Louise with a look that was more sad than ashamed. “I ended it after what happened to Signe. I suddenly coul
dn’t do it anymore, so I no longer see her, and I’d be very grateful if you would refrain from telling this to my wife. It’s over, and there’s no reason to hurt Britt any more than she already has been.”

  “No,” Louise said, instantly agreeing. “But I need to ask you if it’s possible that your lover may have been involved in the fire down at the harbor.”

  He looked at her in confusion, apparently at a loss for where she was headed.

  “If you’d just ended your relationship because of your daughter’s death, then couldn’t your lover have decided, out of pure jealousy, to set fire to the boathouse and direct suspicion against Britt?”

  Louise sat through his violent outburst.

  “What in the hell are you saying! God, no, she couldn’t do that!”

  “And you know that for a fact?” Louise asked and studied him.

  He nodded, outraged. Combed his fingers through his hair and suddenly seemed unhappy. The rage left him, and he leaned back in his chair with a look of despair.

  “She had nothing to do with it, because she was with me the night the fire broke out,” he said and looked straight ahead. “Up in Iceland. It was up there that I ended it between us. So, I can say with certainty that it wasn’t her.”

  “OK, I take it someone can confirm that,” Louise said and stood up.

  “You can call the hotel. We stayed at 101 in Reykjavik,” he told her. “They know us, we’ve stayed there several times before.”

  “Are you visiting Britt out in the prison?” she asked when he followed her out to the entryway. She should have gone out there herself, but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

  He shook his head a little sheepishly.

  “I’ve only been out there once. I think it’s hard. I don’t know what the hell to say to her.”

  “I’m not sure you have to say anything. Maybe it’s enough just to be there,” Louise said.

  He opened the front door and offered her his hand.

  “Is it commonly known that you’re the one who owns the warehouse down at the harbor?” she asked before stepping out to the weather porch.

  “No, but it’s listed in Krak’s Business Directory if you look it up, isn’t it? Or maybe my firm comes up, but it’s in my name.”

  “You should know that the people Nick Hartmann created businesses for have started making very serious threats to his widow, trying to extort the unpaid money from her.”

  “Did he borrow?”

  Louise shook her head.

  “It seems like they’re going after the value the one container of furniture would have brought in. We don’t know how he raised money for the second. But all the furniture is seized now, so that money’s lost. A few days ago, two men broke into the widow’s house and took all the valuables in the home. Now they’re trying to pressure her into selling her duplex apartment and paying 4 million kroner, or else they’ll take her daughter from her.”

  Ulrik stood with one arm against the window frame and listened intently.

  “It sounds absolutely insane,” he said. “Mafia methods. What if they find out that I’m the one who owns the property down there? Would they think of coming here?”

  For the first time he seemed genuinely shaken, Louise thought. She shrugged her shoulders.

  “They’re not the kind of people you’d want to owe money to. But if you didn’t have anything to do with Hartmann, then there’s nothing for them to come after.”

  She walked down the steps.

  “Do I have reason to be concerned?” he asked.

  She turned to him, a bit annoyed that it should be that kind of worry that would upset him.

  “You’d know best yourself,” she couldn’t resist saying.

  48

  He has an account on the Isle of Man, and I’m guessing the money is double-black,” Sejr said as soon as Louise came back to the office at Headquarters.

  “What the hell is double-black?” she asked and tossed her bag on the floor.

  Sejr Gylling had his yellow sunglasses on today, and his hoodie was beige. None of it went very well with his white hair.

  “Double-black is money that neither the tax authorities nor your wife knows about,” he explained and looked as if he’d just found a big bag of Haribo candy someone had forgotten about.

  “He’s generated a huge profit by sending the fees from foreign customers directly to his account on the Isle of Man, where he’s established a business.”

  “Slow down!” said Louise and interrupted him. “Bring it down a notch. I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about, and you’re talking like an Energizer Bunny on full battery.”

  He leaned back, waiting for her to get it. His headphones were on the desk and looked as if he’d completely forgotten them in his preoccupation with his new find.

  “Do you mean Hartmann paid for the extra container with money he had in a hidden account out of the country?” she asked.

  “Not Hartmann,” Sejr said with a shake of his head. “It’s Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen who’s using a hidden account.”

  Louise looked at him with surprise.

  “Well, damn. And you know that for a fact?”

  “I got an international court order to see if either of those two had a foreign account. Those are sent out by the foreign secretary and Interpol, and then it takes several weeks before the official bank information in question gets delivered to Denmark, but I’ve received unofficial information from Interpol, so that’s good enough. On the other hand, they haven’t been able to track down anything on Hartmann.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing for a respected investment consultant to be doing,” Louise exclaimed and leaned back in her office chair. “An account on a British island in the Irish Sea without mandatory reporting. Does it work like a tax haven in the same way as the Canary Islands, Gibraltar, and Monaco?”

  Sejr nodded.

  “What was all that you were saying about generating a profit? From what?” she asked.

  “Yeah, at first glance it looks like all the deposits he received from foreign customers were sent directly in there. Plus, the quite considerable sum his foreign investments must have brought in. I found very few foreign deposits in his regular Danish business account, so I didn’t think he had many foreign customers. But from his vouchers I could see that there’d been lots of business trips and expenses in connection with meetings held abroad, and, of course, that made me wonder whether anything came out of all those travel days he’d had. So, I got suspicious that the foreign profits might be hidden someplace out there.”

  Louise smiled at him. It was so Sejr-like, she decided. Compared with her methods, he was more like a bookkeeper, but right now he was the one who’d gotten further.

  “The authorities on the Isle of Man are sending the bank information to the Ministry of Justice, and they’re reasonably quick compared with a lot of the countries we work with,” he said.

  Louise’s telephone rang, and she shook the image of Ulrik out of her mind.

  “This is Hansen from NITEC. You asked us to look at a computer. Do you have time to come over? I think it’s wise that you see the contents for yourself instead of relying on a transcript!”

  * * *

  “Cannibal Corpse,” said Hansen when he received Louise at the National Police’s IT Crimes Investigation Center. He led her into a little room where the head-banging death metal hammered out of the Dell computer that Bellahøj had seized in their search of the boathouse the day they connected the boys with the assault on Britt.

  “The band gets a higher and higher status whenever one of their songs is banned or someone tries to censor their music,” explained the IT expert, who’d apparently read up on the band’s history. “It’s not exactly the sort of music you hear played on the popular radio stations,” he added, saying the music was downloaded from the Internet.

  Louise nodded quickly when he motioned that he’d turn it off.

  “Have they used the computer for anything other than m
usic?” she asked, still standing behind him with her jacket on and her bag over her shoulder, ready to be out the door again quickly.

  He pulled a chair over and nodded to her.

  She tossed her coat onto the windowsill and sat down in front of the screen.

  “Do you know anything about a special genre of movies called ‘Faces of Death’?” he asked and looked at her.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’ve heard of it. I think I know what it’s about. But I’ve never felt a strong need to deepen my knowledge by watching one of them.”

  He looked like he understood her. At the same time, he obviously had a much wider knowledge of films shared online, where no one censored the content. She had to remind herself that the people in IT investigations were also the ones who had the pleasure of looking through all the seized files with child pornography, which had to be at least as disgusting to lay eyes on.

  “There’s lots of it here. People who die in accidents, recorded on cell phone videos. Traffic victims, suicide, and victims of violence—and it’s that last category that seemed to have lit them up the most.”

  Louise thought about the boys from the boathouse. As for the one who’d beaten a father into a coma, it didn’t surprise her that he’d find something like that amusing.

  He found a list of the downloaded films and let the cursor pass down it.

  “It keeps going,” he said. “A homeless man beaten to death in a basement. A young boy who’s waiting for the bus attacked by two people wearing hoods, and they only leave him when he’s dead.”

  He mentioned a couple more examples, adding that he suspected some of the attacks were staged and the victims didn’t die, as they appear to in the films. But by far, the majority of the films the boys entertained themselves with looked to be genuine.

  “How about e-mail—is there anything to show who the boys corresponded with?”

  “There’s no e-mail or other correspondence, and they haven’t created a Facebook account or used other forums.”

  “Does the name Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen appear anywhere?”

  He shook his head apologetically. It seemed like the computer was used exclusively for music and films.