The Lost Woman

by Sara Blaedel

  “Go over and get him, now,” he said, ignoring her question. “Go home and get your passport, I’ll tell Hanne to book a flight; you can head directly to the airport.”

  “No, I won’t!” She was close to shouting. “It’s one thing to send me out here to scrape him up off the floor after a drunken spree, but it’s totally something else to fly over to England and clean up the mess he’s made.”

  She felt Ulla’s eyes on her from over at the bar. She straightened up. “All right, I’ll go get him. But you call his parents and tell them he’s been found.”

  8

  The flight was short. The taxi dropped Louise off at a narrow parking lot with a painted board fence in front of the police station in Nailsea. For a moment, she studied the yellow one-story brick building, with a sign announcing the local police station’s opening hours. The town looked abandoned, even though there were lights on in the houses clumped together behind the police station.

  During the ride from Bristol Airport, Louise had gone through an entire emotional spectrum. She felt completely in the dark, and her initial relief ended up at anger. She had no idea what to expect or what she would say when she walked in. She just wanted to bring Eik home.

  Tall mounds of gravel for roadwork stood to the right of the entrance. Louise had to walk over a sheet of plywood to get to the door, only to discover it was locked. She looked around for a buzzer, but then a light went on inside, and a tall man in a uniform came out to let her in.

  “Ian Davies,” he said. He held the door for her. “I’m glad you arrived so quickly. Normally we don’t keep people in jail for more than a few hours. Either we release them or transfer them to one of the larger police stations. But this time we had to make an exception.”

  The officer was in his mid-forties, Louise guessed. Reddish-blond hair and green eyes, thin and wiry, and she imagined he was one of those obsessive runners constantly training for another marathon. She ran, too, of course, to stay strong and in shape, but marathons and half-marathons had become something that every mid-level manager in the private sphere felt they needed on their CVs. Louise couldn’t help smiling when she recalled a question Eik asked her once. Did she know the most important thing about running? She’d said something about breathing. Writing about it on a Facebook profile afterward, he’d said.

  She held out her hand, and the sandy-haired man shook it firmly as he spoke. His accent sang at the end of his words. “Because of the case the man under arrest is involved in, we chose to keep him here.”

  Involved in? Louise tried to hide her confusion. It was her understanding that they had thrown Eik in a cell for making a drunken nuisance of himself. She still had no idea why he had suddenly shown up in southwestern England.

  She followed the officer past an empty glassed-in cell to a wide door with barred windows at the end of the hallway. The double doors closed behind them with a loud click that echoed in the closed-in jail.

  “Tell me, what’s my colleague being held for?” Louise said. She followed Davies into a small room. A room to register arrestees, she guessed, from the equipment for taking mug shots and fingerprints. There was very little space; she had to twist around to get past the camera and the chair resting against the wall. A fingerprint pad and a bottle with a plastic lid containing dark powder stood on the countertop beside the sink. Despite the unimpressive surroundings, she felt a bit out of place in her T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.

  A door opened somewhere in the back, followed by footsteps in the hallway. A uniformed female officer with layered, shoulder-length hair walked around the corner and deposited a bag from a pizzeria on the counter before greeting Louise.

  “Sheila Jones. Has anyone offered you a cup of coffee?”

  This time Louise raised her voice a bit when she asked what Eik Nordstrøm had been arrested for, and why they were keeping him in Nailsea instead of following their usual procedure.

  The woman looked at Davies, who was fishing something up out of the bag. “Is he still asleep?” she said, ignoring Louise’s question.

  “Could I at least see him?” Louise looked back and forth between the two.

  Jones grabbed a set of keys and told Louise to follow her. She unlocked a door that was an extension of the room. The yellow walls of the jail looked sickly and melancholy in the bright fluorescent lights. Two cells with thick, dark blue iron doors stood along one side of the corridor. She motioned Louise to the cell farthest back, pulled aside the slat covering the peephole, and let her take a look.

  Eik lay fully dressed on the cot, his hair covering the top half of his face. He was obviously out of it. One arm hung in the air beside the mattress.

  What the hell is going on? Louise wondered. She also felt sad, though not so much about his pathetic condition; here he was, in an English jail, and she had no idea what had happened.

  “We still need to interrogate him,” Jones said. She added that she was the one who had arrested him early that morning. “Your colleague was quite obnoxious, and he was enraged about being brought in, but we had no choice. He refused to tell us what he was doing at the crime scene, and he kept saying that we couldn’t deny him access to the house, that the Danish police had sent him, and that it concerned a missing persons case his department was investigating.”

  She paused shortly, as if she were considering how much she should reveal. “He could barely stand, he was so drunk.”

  “House?” Louise asked. “Couldn’t deny him access to what house?”

  At the rear of the jail, a heavy iron-barred door blocked off the rest of the hallway. There was another cell next to the exit, and a pile of bicycles filled a small niche. It looked like a lost-and-found. Jones followed Louise’s eyes.

  “Mostly we deal with shoplifting, vandalism by minors, and stolen bicycles here in Nailsea. Serious crimes like what happened this weekend are rare.”

  Louise wasn’t interested in the daily routine of the Nailsea Police Station. She wanted to know when Eik would be released so they could return to Copenhagen. And she wanted to know what the hell he was doing at a crime scene in England.

  “In fact, there have been only two killings in the twenty-three years I’ve lived here,” Sheila said, ignoring Louise’s question. “One was a mentally disturbed person who killed a neighbor. The other happened after an argument at the pub. A fight started, and one of them fell in an unfortunate way. We’ve never had a real murder like the one this weekend, so naturally we’ve accepted assistance from Bristol.”

  “Murder?” Louise asked. “Eik Nordstrøm is employed by the Danish Search Department. I’m his superior, and I can assure you he would never force his way into a house and disturb a crime scene. There must be some misunderstanding.”

  Jones didn’t answer; she didn’t need to. The expression on her face showed there was no misunderstanding. Louise breathed deeply as all her new-found strength evaporated. If Eik had broken into a crime scene still being investigated, either he’d had an incredibly good reason to do so or else he’d totally lost it.

  “It’s probably best you tell me what went on before the arrest,” she said, with all the authority she could muster.

  The policewoman peered at her, as if she was just now realizing that her colleague had kept Louise in the dark. “Well, he was contacted yesterday morning when his name came up—”

  “Let’s take it from the beginning,” Louise said, nodding at the door. “Why don’t we go in and sit down? I’d like to know about the case, and what your prosecutor believes my colleague is guilty of.”

  For a moment she considered calling Rønholt, but she decided to wait until she’d heard what had happened.

  They walked back to the office. Louise was offered a slice of pizza and a cup of instant coffee. She realized she hadn’t eaten since yesterday. While she’d been running around trying to track down Eik, she hadn’t thought about food, and then everything had gone so quickly when he’d finally been found. Hanne had booked her on an immediate EasyJet fl
ight to Bristol, and she hadn’t had time to eat in the airport. Mostly she needed a cigarette, but she didn’t smoke. She thanked the policewoman and accepted the greasy slice of pizza.

  Davies sat at a desk, speaking with someone on the phone.

  “They’re on their way,” he told Jones, after joining them a moment later. “We’ve had a team out looking for the murder weapon, but we still haven’t found it.”

  This he said to Louise, as if she should be able to piece together the fragments of information they had shared with her.

  Puzzled, she looked at the policewoman.

  “Last Saturday afternoon, Sofie Parker was shot in her home just outside Nailsea. The shot was fired from the garden, but we have no idea who the killer was, or what weapon was used. Bristol police are doing the ballistics. We expect an answer at the end of the week. It’s almost certain she was shot with a hunting rifle.”

  “But what does this have to do with Eik Nordstrøm?” Louise said. She didn’t recognize the victim’s name, and couldn’t recall any department cases that could be connected with this location.

  “His name popped up when we learned the woman was Danish. We found her birth certificate, and because we had no motive, we checked her maiden name. A search for her had been conducted quite some time ago, and Eik Nordstrøm was listed as her nearest relation. But there was nothing about him being employed by the Danish National Police, or that he was investigating the case. We contacted him solely because of his private relation to the deceased. Naturally we couldn’t allow him access to the crime scene when he arrived yesterday.”

  She looked pleadingly at Louise, as if she wanted to reassure a fellow police officer that they weren’t trying to hinder the Danish police.

  “Last night,” Davies said, “he tried to break into the house again, and he made a ruckus by standing out on the street and yelling. He believed the husband was inside, and he demanded that he open the door. But the husband and daughter aren’t staying at the house. It ended with the neighbors waking up and calling us.”

  “You mentioned that the victim had a Danish maiden name,” Louise said. “How old was she?” Suddenly she had the sinking feeling that she knew where all this was leading.

  “Sofie Bygmann was forty-four years old,” Davies answered. “Nearly eighteen years ago, she was reported missing during a cruise in the Mediterranean. Does that ring a bell?”

  He tossed a case file over to Louise, who slowly began nodding. Eik’s missing girlfriend. Her stomach churned; she wanted to stand up and walk out.

  She touched the case file without opening it.

  “Four years later,” Ian said, nodding at the file on the table, “Sofie Bygmann married Nigel Parker.”

  “You should know that it’s easy to disappear here in Great Britain,” Jones added. “We don’t have civil registration numbers as many European countries do. It’s presumed that about a half-million foreigners are living here unregistered. No authorities were aware she had settled here.”

  Louise was listening with only one ear. She imagined Eik taking the call on his way to buy cigarettes, and how it had made him drop everything.

  “There are several years we can’t account for,” Jones said. “At the moment, her whereabouts during that time are unknown. Her husband says she arrived in England six months before they met. They moved to town after that. He’s an optician. He opened a vision center.”

  “What happened on the afternoon the woman was shot?” Louise still hadn’t opened the file on the table.

  “It’s quite difficult to say,” Jones answered. “Her daughter and husband hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. They’d all come home, as usual. He says his wife was making dinner in the kitchen, when a shot through the window killed her.” She paused a second. “You don’t feel threatened while standing in your own kitchen, doing what you do every day.”

  “He was about to pour a glass of wine,” Davies said, “and before he knew it there was blood everywhere. And his wife lay on the floor, shot in the head, and his daughter screamed.”

  “And nothing had happened earlier?” Louise said.

  They shook their heads. “The family says that Sofie Parker occasionally went into London alone,” Davies said. “Her husband volunteered that information, and he also said he suspects she might have had a lover there.” The policeman’s wavy hair was combed back from his forehead, which emphasized his receding temples, but now he seemed younger than Louise had first guessed. Two boyish dimples appeared when he spoke. “But we have nothing pointing to any suspect.”

  “Of course, we’re also aware it could be a stray bullet,” Jones said. “There are fields behind the house; the shot could have come from there.”

  “But,” Davies said, leaning forward, “it looks more like an execution. Our theory is that the killer fired at close range, and we have clear footprints from the garden—they could be his.”

  “And you’ve ruled out the husband?” Louise said.

  “Yes.” They both nodded. “Her blood was splattered all over him. There’s no doubt he was standing behind her when she was shot.”

  No one spoke for a moment. Davies folded up the pizza box and threw it in the trash.

  “We have no motive,” he admitted. “We’ve got nothing to go on other than the shot that killed her, the footprints, and several witness accounts among their circle of friends. We still hope to identify the person she went to London to meet.”

  “If such a person exists,” Jones said. “We don’t know what she did while in London. That’s why we’re very interested in knowing everything about her Danish past, and what happened when she disappeared from the boat in Italy. It might lead us to a motive.”

  “Am I to understand that the search back then was undertaken by your department?” Davies said.

  Louise nodded.

  “It would be of great help to us if you could gather information about her background. And of course we’re going to have a long conversation with Eik Nordstrøm when he’s ready to speak with us.”

  “And you’re sure it really is the woman reported missing eighteen years ago, that she’s not someone who has assumed her Danish identity?” Louise asked.

  The two English officers exchanged a quick glance.

  “Why would she do that?” Jones said. “But naturally we can ask Eik Nordstrøm to identify her at the morgue.” She repeated that no matter what, they were going to interrogate him as soon as he was able.

  “May I see the house?” Louise asked.

  “We can take you out there right now,” Davies said, as if he were about to suggest that very same thing.

  “Wouldn’t you rather wait, so Nordstrøm can follow along?” Jones said.

  Louise shook her head. “No. We’re taking a flight back to Copenhagen this evening, so let’s just go. In the meantime you can try to rouse him.”

  9

  As soon as they left the Nailsea Police Station in one of the screaming yellow-and-white patrol cars, they were in the countryside. The hilly terrain, dotted with trees and lined with stone walls between fields, stretched out on both sides of the road. Houses appeared at intervals until they reached the Parker family address, located in a cluster of homes.

  All the anxiety and worry that had welled up inside Louise during the past twenty-four hours was turning into anger. She couldn’t understand how Eik could just take off for England without telling her. If for no other reason than because she was his boss, and he had disappeared in the middle of the workday. But, of course, it was mostly a personal blow. On the other hand, she knew he must have been overwhelmed by shock when he got the call from the English police.

  Davies slowed at a pub on the right side of the road. He turned down a narrow driveway leading to three short streets that formed an E. He parked at the last one and shut off the engine.

  Louise sat for a moment studying the nearly identical, gray brick houses, two stories, with front lawns and gates out to the streets. Several big cars
were parked beside the houses. Everything looked neat and well-kept except for one lawn filled with junk. She could see it wasn’t a neighborhood meant for lower incomes. She stepped out of the car.

  The Parkers’ house was surrounded by tall bushes and trees; the garden was hidden, but the house itself stood on a slight rise. It had an open view of the field behind. A sheet of plywood covered a window facing the street. Davies held the gate open for Louise. Police barrier tape blocked the front door, and a sign forbade anyone to enter. The garden was cordoned off along the sidewalk and farther on to the opposite side, but there were no police officers in sight. Davies lifted the key out of his pocket, but before unlocking the door, he rang the doorbell and waited.

  “The cleaners will arrive later today, but we’re allowing the husband and daughter to move back in. Our crew of technicians finished up this morning. But I don’t know if the two of them want to move back. Right now they’re staying with his mother in Bath.”

  Louise nodded. She eyed him for a moment. There was something very civil about the way he and Sheila Jones were treating her. If an Englishman had barged in and tried to contaminate one of her crime scenes, she also would have arrested him immediately, but she wasn’t sure if she would have been so accommodating and cooperative before she had finished checking the man’s explanation. Apparently they trusted her, and that impressed her.

  “Hello,” Davies shouted when he opened the door. As expected, no one answered. He had picked up a newspaper and the day’s mail from outside the door. The kitchen/dining room was to the right. The blood had been washed from the room, but the markings around the bloodstains remained for the cleaners to take care of. They stepped inside. It was well lit, with upper cabinets along the entire wall just inside the door. A glass cabinet containing porcelain and wineglasses hung on the opposite wall. The stove stood along the wall bordering the entryway. Davies pointed. “She was standing at the sink when she was shot.”

  Jones was right, Louise thought. When you’re in your kitchen fixing dinner, you’re not on alert. You are completely unprotected. You can’t see out and you don’t know who is looking in.