The Running Girl

by Sara Blaedel

  “Where are she and the child now?” asked Louise.

  “They’re still up with the friend, but we need to see about getting them moved. There’s a team from North Zealand’s police up there now.”

  Willumsen explained that the farm was a good distance from the nearest neighbor.

  “No one saw when the child’s bed was brought to the farm, and as far as I understand you have to go up a long driveway to get to the house,” he said. “We need to get the crime techs up there,” Suhr decided and lifted the phone to call Slotsherrensvej, where he was put straight through to Frandsen.

  Louise felt a knot in her stomach. She thought about the film and didn’t doubt for a second that they’d follow through on their threats if Mie didn’t pay. But she couldn’t pay. What was she supposed to do about it?

  “How far are you with the arrests?” she asked and looked at Willumsen.

  If the ones who chased Mie were the same ones who’d shot down her husband in cold blood, they needed to be stopped now.

  “Two of the boys have just been arrested. We’re missing Thim, but his supervisor tells us he’s on the way back to the garage with some parts he went out to Værløse to pick up. He’s training to be an auto mechanic.”

  Willumsen squinted his eyes and stood with a thoughtful expression on his face. He agreed with Louise that the suspect who was with Nymann at the shooting out on Dyvekes Allé looked the most like Thim, and it was obvious that the lead investigator was mentally preparing to question the boys when they arrived at Headquarters, with their rights to think about.

  “Toft is ready to meet him at the garage when he gets back,” he said and told them that Michael Stig and the officers who’d assisted in the arrests would be coming through the door any minute. “And in an hour, we’ll have the images from the film printed out on paper. And then they’ll have a goddamned hard time trying to explain themselves.”

  He slapped his hands together with a satisfied clap and left the office.

  Suhr looked at Louise.

  “We need to figure out if Fasting-Thomsen was financially involved in what was stored in his warehouse,” he said.

  * * *

  Music poured out of the office when Louise opened the door. She stopped dead at the sound of the classical notes that rose to the ceiling in the comparatively shabby space, making the darkened room seem much too small for all that sound.

  Surprised, she looked over at Sejr, who smiled and explained that now and then you need to clean out your head so more can go in.

  Louise thought of Britt out at Vestre Prison and hoped that someone had taken care of getting a little of her music out there.

  “I think Hartmann bungled it,” Sejr said and turned down the volume.

  He waved her over to his screen, where she could see he’d logged into the Fraud Department’s archive.

  “I searched for designer furniture, and on August twenty-eighth we received a call from a buyer for a large furniture chain on Jutland. He’d been contacted by a person who offered him a quantity of Arne Jacobsen’s Swan chairs. When the buyer asked when they could be delivered, he was told that they’d just arrived from the factory in Asia, and then he realized something was wrong.”

  “How?” Louise asked and looked at him in confusion.

  “It’s possible that some of the genuine designer furniture is manufactured out there, but the classic Egg and Swan are only manufactured in Europe, and you always have to account for extra delivery time because they can’t be ordered like mass produced goods.”

  “So, it had to be someone without that knowledge who was trying to get rid of something,” she concluded.

  “Yeah, pretty clumsy, wouldn’t you say?”

  She nodded.

  “My guess is that Hartmann knew what he was doing when he purchased, but he didn’t know how to go about selling replicated furniture. Others must have handled that part. With the large quantities, it’s actually not that easy unless you have established channels who’ll buy,” he explained. “If he, as we’re assuming, tried to find private buyers, it’s a big job. And with furniture chains and auction houses you risk being exposed if the quality doesn’t live up to the authentic product. That’s why it’s best to stay away from them and go after the gullible and ill-informed private customers, who don’t know enough to challenge the seller on details.”

  “Doesn’t it also draw too much attention if a large quantity of expensive furniture suddenly pops up?” Louise asked and emptied the cola Sejr had offered her.

  “Yes, there’s a natural limit to how much the market can bear. And it could very well be that that’s what pissed off his original collaborators. They probably discovered what he was up to.”

  Things started to whirl for Louise. In her mind, she saw Mie and her little daughter and knew that neither of them would be safe if the sum of money really was so large.

  “Could Hartmann have been working for Ulrik the whole time? Are we the ones who’ve been mistaken in believing in the biker angle?” she asked and screwed the cap on her cola bottle before dropping it into the box beside the fridge.

  “No,” Sejr decided. “If it had been those two, then Hartmann wouldn’t have been killed. You don’t slaughter the fatted calf. The capitalist needs someone who can do the work. If neither had felt cheated or squeezed, then it could have been an ongoing business and they would have continued raking it in. There was another party involved, who at some point felt cheated—I’m entirely sure of that.”

  The telephone on Louise’s desk started to ring, and Sejr put his headphones on and turned his gaze toward the screen.

  At first, it was difficult for her to hear the words, which were nearly a whisper. For a moment, she thought it was Mie and nervously sat up straight. But when the woman cleared her throat a couple of times and got her voice under control she realized that it was Vigdís Ólafsdóttir on the other end. Jón’s mother.

  “Would you please come out? I need to talk with you.”

  And then, the Icelandic woman began to cry.

  49

  When, a half hour later, Louise stepped into the large open kitchen in the apartment on Strand Boulevard, the doors to the French balcony stood wide open. The wind made the thin, lightly colored curtains flutter so strongly that they struck the radiators with small, heavy snaps. It was cold in the room. Ice-cold. And at the oval dining table sat Vigdís Ólafsdóttir with a white sweater over her shoulders and eyes that were all cried out.

  After they’d exchanged greetings, Louise walked over and closed the balcony doors before sitting down at the table. The kitchen was cleaned up, everything was fine and bright, the colors of the flowers in the windowsill matched the Nordic-themed paintings on the wall.

  So far, Vigdís hadn’t said anything but hello, but she seemed grateful that Louise had come lightning quick.

  “They picked up Jón,” she said when Louise sat down across from her. “He was driven away in a police car.”

  Quiet. The room was still so cold that Louise felt goose bumps rising under the sleeves of her blouse.

  “It’s all so terrible, and I can’t understand it anymore,” she began but had difficulty going on. Her nose was slender and delicate, and her eyebrows so well formed that they looked as if they were drawn on. Her features were almost doll-like.

  “Do you know why your son and his friends were arrested today?” asked Louise.

  The Icelandic woman nodded slowly.

  “I didn’t know the others were picked up, too.”

  “They killed a man.”

  Louise tried to catch her eye.

  “Not Jón,” his mother exclaimed with conviction in her voice.

  “No, not your son,” she answered with thinly veiled sarcasm.

  A bird had landed on the railing out on the balcony.

  Vigdís leaned forward again as if to underscore that she meant it seriously. That she knew perfectly well that that’s what every mother would say, but there was more weight
behind her words.

  “I know the sort of shit they sit and watch in there behind the closed door. And I’ve always feared that Jón’s friends might one day cross the line.”

  “But you didn’t think about stepping in?” Louise asked and looked at her. “You never believed your own son was just like his friends?”

  There was a shake of the head.

  “The night your son’s friends shot and killed Nick Hartmann, his young wife became a widow and their two-month-old daughter lost her father.”

  Vigdís Ólafsdóttir hid her face in her hands and sat a while before she straightened up and looked at Louise.

  “If I’d known it were that serious, I would absolutely have stepped in. But the first I was aware of it was when the two officers arrested him a little while ago.”

  Louise leaned back and listened.

  “I called you because I’m scared,” Jón’s mother said, and her blue eyes suddenly appeared unsure as she looked away. “If it really turns out that his friends have killed a man, then I know my son well enough to know that he’ll tell the police everything he knows, and so I’m scared that something may happen to him afterward…”

  She stopped short and fought back tears.

  “That they’ll come after him when he’s talked.”

  Louise sat a while considering. The goose bumps had gone away and her muscles were beginning to relax.

  “You don’t need to be nervous about that part now,” she said. “We know that it wasn’t your son who did the shooting that evening, and the evidence we’re in possession of is so strong that we have enough to get the suspects convicted without needing his testimony.”

  Jón’s mother listened without looking at Louise. As if it were asking too much of her to be completely present while the police authorities confronted her with things she didn’t want to know.

  “Of course, we’re interested in hearing what your son has to say, and if it turns out that he rode in the car out to Amager that evening, but just didn’t participate in the shooting, then that’s another matter,” said Louise.

  Vigdís Ólafsdóttir nodded quietly, as if she was searching for an explanation. She breathed deeply and ran her fingers over her hand.

  “Jón’s never had a father,” she began. “It’s my feeling that he’s looking for that raw and masculine side in his friends, but he doesn’t have it himself. He’s soft and sensitive, and he’s missing something that I’ll never be able to give him.”

  “And you think he gets it from that crowd?” Louise interrupted.

  Vigdís stretched out a hand to stop her.

  “No, I don’t mean that at all. The fact that he goes around with them I take as more of a rebellion against me. He feels that I’ve let him down, and maybe I have by being more occupied with my own needs than with a desire to create an integrated family that he could be part of. I just mean he’s looking for boundaries. Apparently, I haven’t been too good at setting those for him, and there haven’t been others to do it. Maybe that’s why he’s wandered so far off. But he’s not violent, he wouldn’t harm anyone. It’s a battle that’s raging inside him.”

  Louise let her talk.

  “If you hadn’t picked him up, he would have gone in himself,” the mother said pensively. “I could see it in him, but he wasn’t willing to talk about it. He has hardly spoken to me at all recently, just lay there in his room. Look, he’s been very affected by what happened to his friends in the fire.”

  “What do you know about the fire?” Louise asked and observed her.

  “Nothing. Nothing except that I never believed it was Britt who set fire to the boathouse.”

  Louise looked at her with surprise.

  “Do you know her?” she asked, astonished.

  The woman shook her head.

  “No. But that’s not how you act when you lose someone. You go to pieces and you’re devastated. There are other feelings that make people burn houses down. It’s not the kind that women have.”

  “It’s happened before,” Louise pointed out.

  “Maybe from jealousy, but not from sorrow.”

  Vigdís sat and played with a thread that had come loose on the sleeve of her high-neck sweater, which fit snugly over her chest and accentuated her bosom.

  It was quiet between them while their thoughts settled down and became peaceful.

  Louise gazed out the window, where the bird was about to fly off.

  Then she straightened up a little and turned her eyes back to Vigdís.

  “Tell me. It wouldn’t have been you who had a relationship with Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen, would it?”

  It had suddenly struck her that Jón’s mother had been away with her boyfriend on the eve of the fire, when she and Michael Stig came to speak with her son.

  Vigdís Ólafsdóttir sat with her eyes blue and bright. They weren’t ashamed or frightened; she seemed more relieved that she hadn’t had to confess it herself.

  “How long have you known each other?” asked Louise.

  “Eight years,” answered the Icelandic woman and let her eyes rest while she waited for Louise’s reaction. “I was twenty-seven when I came back to Copenhagen. Jón was starting third grade.”

  Eight years was a long time to be somebody’s lover, thought Louise, especially when you’re the age when it’s natural to marry and have a family.

  She was apparently easy to read, because Vigdís smiled sadly.

  “Ulrik would never leave his family,” she said and shook her head. “He made that clear from the beginning. He loved them more than anything on earth, and he never promised me more than what we had. And it was enough for me. We were together several times a week and traveled a lot. I always felt I got a good deal out of it. Everything that people call the whipped cream on a relationship.”

  “But you don’t see each other anymore?” Louise asked, leaning back in her chair.

  The blue eyes flooded, and a tear ran over the tip of her slender nose.

  “Not after the terrible thing that happened to his daughter down at the sailing club,” she said, shaking her head. “When he found out that Jón was with them that evening, he put an end to it. But then that’s understandable.”

  She looked down at the table and dried her cheeks.

  “We’re also moving,” she continued and lifted her eyes again.

  Louise looked at her, not understanding.

  “This is his apartment we’re living in, and he pays. He threw us out when all of that happened.”

  They sat a while in silence.

  “What do you know about the evening down at the sailing club?” Louise said.

  “Nothing other than what I’ve been told. I wasn’t home. Ulrik had invited me to go with him to Dragsholm Castle, where his company was holding a seminar.”

  Louise gawked.

  “You were with him up there?”

  Vigdís nodded.

  “I was almost always with him when there was something. It wasn’t any secret among his colleagues and business associates that we saw each other. I also traveled with him on business trips and all the adventure outings—not because I do that sort of thing, but I liked to watch him and he liked to have company.”

  “Does that mean you were with him when the police got hold of him at Dragsholm Castle?”

  Louise felt her heart thumping against her chest. She saw the darkness on the road and the blood from Signe’s head, and she remembered the heavy stillness at the National Hospital with the much-too-brightly-lit empty hallways. Meanwhile, Ulrik had been with his lover and covered it up with the poor excuse that he couldn’t back out of the scheduled seminar, as much as he’d like to.

  The anger knotted in her neck, and she saw that Vigdís had long ago read her thoughts.

  “We couldn’t keep seeing each other after that. You understand, of course,” she said.

  “Yes, thank you. I understand,” Louise said with a nod.

  She also wondered if the Icelandic woman felt she’d put
her life on hold during the time she was with Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen. He’d apparently provided for her and paid her rent. Her entire existence had been dependent upon his good will. She’d also lost a good deal the night that Signe died. And if he’d turned his back on her when he found out that her son had been there that evening, then possibly she had reason to feel jealous.

  “Were you also with Ulrik in Iceland the night the fire was set at the boathouse and warehouse down by the harbor?”

  Vigdís didn’t try to pretend as if she didn’t know what night they were talking about. She propped her chin on her hands.

  Then she nodded. Heavy and sad, without a spark in her blank eyes.

  “He ended it the night we went up there, and he wanted us to move out as quickly as possible. It turned out, he’d already found an apartment for us. We were supposed to go see it the next day. He had money with him to pay the deposit in cash, so we could move in the next month.”

  Efficient, thought Louise.

  “He’d also arranged for some of our furniture to be shipped up there, but there’s not enough room for all of it, so he’ll take the rest himself,” Vigdís continued, adding with a little smile that he’d even managed to get her a job as a secretary with one of his Icelandic business associates.

  “That’s how easily we’re swept aside,” she exclaimed with a brief, dry laugh.

  “What does your son say about it?” Louise asked and suddenly felt sorry for Vigdís, who’d trusted another woman’s husband so blindly.

  The Icelandic woman shrugged her shoulders.

  “He doesn’t really say anything. I think he’s upset to be leaving his school and friends, but he’s never cared for Ulrik. He doesn’t think he treated us right when he wouldn’t have us full-time. And I don’t blame him,” she said thoughtfully. “At the same time, I sense that he’s glad we’re leaving. It’s my understanding that it would mean a lot to him to be part of a real family. He’s never had that, so he probably hopes I find a new man once we go home to Iceland and everything will be more normal. So maybe he’s not so upset about our leaving.”

  Vigdís sat getting lost in her own thoughts.