The Lost Woman

by Sara Blaedel

  Frederik knocked on the door when they reached the apartment. They waited. The ceiling lightbulb hummed. They heard a loud click when the light shut off automatically; Camilla walked over and pressed the large brown button to turn it back on. Frederik knocked one last time, while Louise stood on the next-to-last step, her hand on the banister.

  “We’re going in,” she said, and she reached for the key in Frederik’s hand. She banged on the door and was about to insert the key when the neighbor’s door opened. A young man in scruffy jogging pants and a hoodie, with a cigarette in his hand, asked what they were doing. Then he noticed Frederik and Camilla.

  “Oh, hi. Did you forget something?”

  “Hi, Sylvester,” Camilla said. “No, but we can’t find Eik. Have you seen him?” She stayed out in the hall while Frederik and Louise walked inside.

  It didn’t take long to check the studio apartment. There was an alcove for a bed in the kitchen–living room. There was a small balcony and a bathroom. But there was no Eik.

  “I don’t think he’s been here,” Frederik said. “It looks exactly how we left it yesterday.”

  A black two-seat leather sofa hugged the wall; a round dining table with four chairs stood in front of the long window. There was little indication of anyone living there. But then no one did, for the time being.

  Louise looked around one last time before they walked out and locked the door behind them. The neighbor had retreated to his own apartment, and Camilla was waiting for them outside the building.

  “Let’s try Ulla,” she said. She tucked her arm under Louise’s. “Did you two have an argument?”

  “Not really.” Louise shook her head. “This morning we had a talk with Rønholt. One of us has to leave the department, now that we’re living together. But that’s just the way it is, and anyway, I said I should be the one to find another job. It didn’t sound like he was worried about it.”

  * * *

  The smoke hit them like a gray brick wall when they opened the door to the little pub. Louise recognized several of the people standing around the billiard table. Ulla stood behind the bar, in front of the wall of liquor bottles, pouring two shots of aquavit. The music was low, possibly Duran Duran; the loudest noise in the pub was the crack of billiard balls ramming each other. Few people were talking. It seemed like some sort of private gathering, almost monotonous, rote, like a theater play that had run too long.

  “You two want anything?” Frederik asked.

  Louise said she actually could stand another beer.

  “I’ll have one, too,” Camilla said. She gazed around in curiosity.

  Small video-game machines lined the wall behind the billiard table, beyond which hung a jukebox with old hits handwritten on yellowed paper visible through its Plexiglas window. The walls and ceiling were covered with glued-on bottle caps, and tar from years of nonstop smoking. Several of the regulars ogled the three of them.

  “Was this where he hung out before you met him?” Camilla asked. Frederik handed her the beers and went back to pay.

  Louise nodded. “He’s good friends with Ulla.” She glanced up at the bar.

  “Was he sleeping with her?” Camilla eyed the stocky, middle-aged woman with coal-black dyed hair and arched eyebrows. She wore a midnight-blue satin blouse.

  Louise let that hang in the air. She didn’t really know. She’d avoided digging into what might have gone on between them beyond their friendship, which Eik had never tried to conceal.

  She waited to see if Ulla would come over, but the pub owner held her spot behind the bar, talking to a drunk who almost fell backward every time he downed a shot.

  Finally Louise walked up to her. “Hi, Ulla! Have you seen Eik around?”

  Ulla had glanced over at them, and though Louise knew she’d recognized her, now she gave no indication that they’d ever met. She merely shook her head.

  Louise paused, but the woman said no more. “I’m a bit worried that something might have happened to him,” she continued. “No one’s seen him since this morning. Do you have any idea where he might be? Have you talked to him today?”

  “No!” Ulla shook her head again.

  The group at the billiard table stopped shooting, and a man sitting alone at a table by the door stared at Louise and Ulla while downing his beer.

  Louise fought off her irritation with the woman. “Would you tell me if you had seen him?”

  Ulla glanced at her before shrugging her shoulders and turning away. Her animosity toward Louise was palpable. Most likely, she believed that Louise had stolen Eik from her and her pub.

  Louise walked back to the table. “That was a waste of time.” She was about to pull her coat on when Ulla came over. She avoided eye contact with Louise as she began swiping at their table with a red dishrag.

  “My advice to you is to leave him be. Don’t hang on to him all the time, give him some room. He doesn’t like to be controlled.”

  “We’d better go,” Camilla said, when Ulla returned to the high bar.

  No one around the billiard table made a sound. All eyes followed them when they left without drinking their beers.

  5

  Louise’s bicycle was still at Vega, but instead of riding back there with Camilla and Frederik, she took a cab to the city center.

  The city’s lights reflected off the harbor water as the taxi driver sped toward the newly renovated Kalvebod Brygge waterfront, away from South Harbor’s unpretentious architectural style. The somewhat dreary buildings gave way to endless facades of glass and steel, a beautiful contrast to the old city’s tile and copper roofs. They drove past the Royal Theatre and New Harbor to the King’s New Square, which was warmly lit in the winter darkness by restaurants and numerous bars, then through Copenhagen’s old red light district. It amazed her that people were hanging out around the enormous sailor’s anchor, drinking beer in the bitter cold of January. They took the Esplanade up to Østerport Station, where the driver slowed and began checking street numbers.

  Louise had never visited her boss. When she hopped out of the taxi and walked toward his building, she realized that Rønholt must be able to see the apartment on Gefionsgade where her father grew up.

  Rønholt opened the door of his fourth-floor apartment wearing slippers and casual clothing. “Something’s happened, I’m sure of it,” Louise gasped. “You know him! Eik would never leave Charlie out on the street and just disappear, and he wouldn’t just not show up for the concert; he’d been looking forward to it for several months. We have to initiate a search for him.”

  Ragner Rønholt led her into the living room. He picked up his wineglass from next to an open book on a table near the bay window. One of the windows offered a view of the tracks behind Østerport; Langelinje quay was probably visible from there in the daytime. Louise knew he had lived practically forever in this rented apartment, for which he paid very little.

  “Eik is a grown man, and he hasn’t been gone for twelve hours,” he explained patiently. “Can you just see how it would look to initiate a search for one of the Search Department’s own people so soon?”

  He offered Louise a glass of wine; she shook her head, and began pacing anxiously around the room.

  “Louise, please, sit down.” He pointed at the sofa, and they both sat. “It’s wonderful you two have found each other, even though it’s given me problems in the department, of course. Eik is a fine investigator and a good person. I’ve known him now for many years.”

  Louise was aware of that, and now she felt embarrassed; apparently Rønholt believed she was there because she and Eik were having problems. “This has nothing to do with our relationship. What’s happened…?”

  “Nothing has happened to him.” His voice was measured, calm. “Eik is able to take care of himself. But it’s possible there are sides to him you don’t know. Maybe he should have told you, but it looks like he hasn’t.”

  A chill ran through Louise’s body, and already she regretted turning down the wine.
“I know once in a while Eik hits bottom, and he needs help getting back up.” She turned to Rønholt. “You’re the one who sent me to pick him up that time he was dead drunk and couldn’t get to work. But nothing was wrong today—everything was normal. We were in your office. You saw him!”

  “These sprees he goes on, they often come without warning.” He seemed to weigh his words as he took a sip of wine. “That side of him can be difficult to deal with, but you’ll have to accept it if you want to be a part of Eik Nordstrøm’s life.”

  “So you’re thinking he left the office this morning to go get drunk? Then why did he take Charlie with him? He could easily have left the dog at the station.” She shook her head, annoyed now that he didn’t understand.

  “I just came from South Harbor,” she continued, realizing it did no good to reproach Rønholt. She needed to convince him. “He wasn’t at his pub, Ulla’s Place. Ulla hadn’t seen him. At least that’s what she claimed. I really think you’re wrong about this.”

  Without a word, he stood up and walked out into the hall. He began putting his shoes on and asked Louise to come into the kitchen. “There’s something you need to see.” He opened the door to the back stairs and turned on the light, then he checked to make sure he had his keys before walking down.

  The apartment was in a classic, beautiful Østerbro building, but the back stairs weren’t all that different from Louise’s in Frederiksberg. It was where people stored empty bottles, old shoes, sacks of potatoes, and other things they needed out of the way, making it difficult at times to move past.

  The light went out, and Louise stopped. In the dark, she heard voices and a television from another apartment. Rønholt reached the next landing and turned the light back on.

  “What are we doing?” Louise asked, as she struggled to avoid falling among all the junk on the narrow stairs.

  “Patience,” he said, as they kept walking down.

  His key ring rattled as he leaned over to open the basement lock. A moment later they entered a long passageway. On the left, a few large sheets hung over a clothesline in an open room for drying clothes; it smelled of soap, fabric softener, and dust. He continued down the passageway. The farther they went, the mustier it smelled. Dust was thick on the walls around them. Hot water pipes creaked above their heads, the fluorescents hummed metallically, and the filthy floor crackled under their feet. Their voices seemed enclosed, yet they echoed, as if the two of them were in an endless series of underground passages.

  “Okay, what are we doing here?” she asked again, as he disappeared around a corner. When the lights went out again, she pulled her iPhone out of her pocket and switched on the built-in flashlight. “Hello!”

  “Over here,” he said.

  The fluorescents flickered a few times and came back on, their sharp white glare blinding Louise for a moment.

  They turned a corner at the end of a hallway. Rønholt stopped in front of the last dark brown wooden door in the long row of basement rooms. A dry heat hung heavily in the air; a furnace rumbled somewhere deeper in the basement.

  Farther in, Louise peeked inside the old furnace room, where vents were clicking. Rønholt knocked on the peeling wooden door. “Eik!” he yelled. “Are you in there?”

  Louise joined him again, gaping in disbelief. “You think he’s hiding in there?”

  He knocked again. “Come on out now,” he said, as if he were waking up a child on a school morning. A moment later, he pushed the door open and stepped aside so Louise could enter the longish, dark basement room. A flashlight and sleeping bag lay on a small rubber mattress on the floor. A full ashtray and an empty glass sat beside the mattress. The space looked like a caricature of a dungeon where a kidnapper would hide a victim.

  “What in the world is this?”

  “It’s your boyfriend’s shelter. He stays here when he needs to shut himself off from the world. This has gone on now for several years.”

  Louise squatted down to check the cigarette butts in the ashtray, but they looked old. Dust and chunks of stucco from the ceiling covered the sleeping bag.

  “He has his own key to the basement, and when he’s down here, I bring him food and drink. Otherwise, I leave him alone.”

  “So you let him stay here?” Louise couldn’t believe it.

  “I leave him in peace,” he said, correcting her. “Our agreement is that he can drop out and hide here in my storage room, but if he’s here more than three or four days, I head down and get him.”

  “But why? I thought the black hole he disappeared into was Ulla’s Place.”

  Rønholt nodded and shut the door, now that Louise had seen what she needed to. “Usually that’s right. But don’t we all sometimes dream about a place where no one can get to us? This is Eik’s way of doing that. I suppose it’s primitive, but it works for him.”

  Louise shook her head. “But what about his job?”

  “He always has way too much overtime; he takes those extra hours off.”

  Louise couldn’t understand any of this, least of all why her boss covered up for Eik.

  Rønholt walked over to the button light switch and punched it a few times. “Eik went through a bad period when his girlfriend disappeared.” They began walking back along the passage. “I don’t know how familiar you are with that story.”

  Louise had a sinking feeling in her gut, but she nodded. She knew Eik had been sailing in the Mediterranean when his girlfriend suddenly disappeared. Without going into details, he’d told her they had quarreled, and in the end he had decided to return to Copenhagen. He didn’t hear about the tragedy until he was back in South Harbor. The two young guys they had been sailing with, one of whom owned the thirty-four-foot sailboat, were found drowned in the ocean, not far from the boat. There was no sign of Eik’s girlfriend, and her belongings weren’t on the boat.

  “I think not knowing was the hardest part for him,” Rønholt continued. “And of course not being there to take care of her.”

  He slammed the basement door shut behind them.

  Suddenly an enormous wave of sadness overcame Louise as they walked up the back steps. Here she thought she was beginning to know Eik, while he might have been deeply unhappy all this time. It hit her hard that she wasn’t able to make him happy, to make him forget, if it really was the loss of his girlfriend that haunted him. Exactly like the sorrow she had carried around for years after what happened with her lover, Klaus, a grief she had finally come to terms with just the year before. They had shared so much and forged a life together, but there were secrets. Explosive and dangerous ones she’d uncovered too late.

  “It wasn’t long after Eik joined the department that he asked for leave to go down there. I admit, I had my doubts about letting him go. He was personally involved in an ongoing investigation his own department was conducting. He wasn’t the investigator, of course, and he was kept informed just like anyone else who reports a person missing.”

  He unlocked the door to his apartment. “I was more afraid he might not be able to handle the situation emotionally. But it was great motivation for him, and he never gives up on a case. And over the years, we’ve found a way to handle the hard times, when he needs a break. I keep my eye on him, and it’s all gone fine up to now.”

  Louise stood in the hallway, getting ready to leave. “Okay, but right now it’s not a pause he needs, it seems. It’s been a long time since he’s been in your basement room.”

  Furrows appeared above Rønholt’s white eyebrows; he seemed to agree with her. “In fact, he hasn’t shown up here since he met you. To me that’s a good sign. And no, it doesn’t look like that’s the case this time.”

  “Something’s happened,” Louise said. She was sure of it; her skin prickled again when Rønholt nodded.

  “It does seem strange,” he admitted. Her boss was beginning to realize the seriousness of the situation. “And Ulla hasn’t seen him?”

  “She hasn’t talked to him, either. At least that’s what she said.�
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  That moment, standing there with Rønholt, all remaining doubts disappeared. This wasn’t just her being overly concerned.

  “We’ll put out a search for him tomorrow morning,” he said. He asked if she was driving or if he should call a taxi.

  “You know what, I’d rather walk.” It was very late, but she desperately needed some air.

  6

  Before rushing down the stairway to leave Dina and Charlie with Melvin, Louise made several calls to Eik’s cell phone. His voice mail kicked in every time, asking her to leave a message. She called Rønholt to check if he’d heard anything during the night, but he knew nothing more.

  “I’m going to run up to his parents in Hillerød before coming in to work,” she said, explaining that she had found their address online. “Have you ever met them?”

  “I’ve only met his sister, but I think Mie is in Africa right now. I’ll set everything in motion soon as I get to the station, and I’ll see if I can’t hurry things up with the tower records on his cell phone.”

  The red stone house stood at the end of a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Hillerød. Eik had told her he’d left home at seventeen, and he hadn’t had much to do with his parents since then. But she didn’t know if the sporadic contact stemmed from some problem, or if he just didn’t fit in with suburban conformity.

  Louise called his parents from the car, apologizing for disturbing them so early in the morning. When she said she was with the Copenhagen Police, his father sounded a bit dismissive, but when he heard she was his son’s colleague, and that they shared an office, his attitude changed. Suddenly she was more than welcome to come; they would both be at home until eleven, when his wife had a doctor’s appointment.

  The house stood close to the road, and on her way to the door she noticed what looked like a large lawn on the other side. A classic fifties residential area house. Some lawns had swing sets, others boasted flower gardens in pristine condition. Retirees and families with children, Louise decided. Not very much stuck out. Odd that this seemingly conventional suburban community was where the free-spirited Eik had grown up and played as a child, she thought. She rang the doorbell.