by Sara Blaedel
“But you haven’t been there before?” Davies asked.
Eik shook his head. His eyes cleared a bit. “No. I haven’t been there before. I don’t know what I expected or hoped for. But I wanted to talk to somebody. To her family. I knew her husband was in the house when she was shot.”
“And how did you know she had been shot?” Davies hurried to ask.
“I was told on the phone.” His voice was firmer now. “I decided to wait. I walked up to the pub and had a few beers. Well, probably more than a few. Everyone in the bar was talking about what had happened, of course. People seemed to know the optician’s wife came from someplace in Scandinavia.”
You could have called, damn it, Louise thought. He’d spent all afternoon and evening killing time while she had been worried out of her mind.
“I drank beer and listened to the gossip. And at some point, I walked back to the house and rang the doorbell. Or maybe I knocked on the door.”
“The neighbors described it as pounding on the door and shouting,” Jones said.
Eik nodded. “That’s probably right. I wanted inside. I wanted to know what kind of life she’d been hiding from me!”
Strange, Louise thought. Why wouldn’t you rather know why someone put a bullet through her forehead?
Louise looked at the clock and apologized, saying they had to leave soon for the airport.
“As we’ve mentioned,” Sheila Jones said, “we are very interested in knowing about Sofie Parker’s past in Denmark. Is this something your department can assist us with, or did the investigation take place somewhere else?”
“The search was ours, so the case is in our department.” Louise handed Sheila her card. “We want to help, but, of course, I have to talk to my boss first. You can contact me at those numbers and that email address.”
* * *
They drove ten minutes without speaking before Louise exploded. “What in the fucking hell did you think you were doing? Did you even think?” The young policeman driving them to the airport shifted a bit in his seat up front. “Are you out of your mind, or what?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He started to lay his hand on top of hers, but Louise pulled it away viciously.
“I’ve been out at your parents’. Rønholt and I moved heaven and earth to find you. What could you have been thinking? You left Charlie out on the street!”
“Is he okay?”
“Yes, no thanks to you! It was pure luck I noticed him outside the market, where he’d been sitting for hours.”
Eik’s hands were folded in his lap. After a moment he asked, “What was in the house out there? You said the family was home.”
“They came.” Louise stared out into the darkness covering the landscape, at the narrow, winding roads and tall trees captured by the car’s headlights.
“How was the daughter doing?”
Louise shrugged without answering. She leaned her head back.
The silence between them screamed, the mood so heavy that she literally felt she was being squashed down in her seat.
He tried again in the plane after takeoff. “The husband didn’t see anything before the shot?”
“It was getting dark out. It’s possible that Stephanie caught a glimpse of the killer, but the police got nothing out of her from the first interview. Now they’re trying again.”
“Stephanie?” he asked.
“The daughter, but she wants to be called Steph.”
“What do you think of her?”
Louise exploded. “Were you even going to call?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were you even going to call me? Did you bother thinking for a single second that I was worried to death about you?”
Silence.
“Eik, what the hell’s going on?”
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
Louise said nothing, though she wanted to shake him, hold him, comfort him, and curse him out. Leave him. Stay.
“How much do the police know?” he asked. “Did something happen before the murder? Disagreements? Threats?”
“Stop it!”
“Was the family being harassed? What do the police have to go on? Come on, bring me up to date, we have a case here.”
“Let me spell this out for you,” Louise snarled as she turned to him. “We don’t have a case. I have a case, and you are not a part of it. Got that?”
He was about to say something, but he sat quietly. Neither one of them spoke during the rest of the flight. Nor did they speak in the taxi to Frederiksberg.
Louise was still enraged. Not one single time had he even tried to explain. All she’d gotten was a pathetic “I’m sorry.” But she couldn’t care less about an apology. She wanted to know how he could do what he did, abandon her like that. Abandon Charlie. She had a right to more than a puny apology, but when she asked for an explanation, it was almost as if he wasn’t listening.
“Talk to me, damn you!” she screamed, after fetching Dina and Charlie down at Melvin’s and reassuring him that Eik was home again. “What’s going on? I don’t know, are you living with me or are you moving out? What have you decided? And what the hell is it with that basement room at Rønholt’s building. I don’t even know you!”
He spread his arms out in despair. “I’ll walk the dogs.”
Louise was about to ask if he was planning on coming back, or if she maybe ought to go out and start looking for him after an hour or so. Instead she started packing his things.
In the bathroom, she tossed his deodorant, toothbrush, and shaving supplies in a sack. She packed his clothes from the bedroom shelves she’d cleared for him. She stuffed everything into plastic bags. While she worked, she realized it wasn’t Eik’s dropping everything to go to his old girlfriend that hurt her most. She could understand that, even though he should have let her know what was going on. She had been through something similar herself. Shadows from the past can appear that need to be dealt with before you can move on. She also recognized that he’d been living with uncertainty for many years. Of course he would react.
But she wouldn’t accept his silence and distance, when she was trying to understand and to show she was there for him. Instead of explaining, he turned away. Without a word.
* * *
After piling all his things in the hallway, she stood in the entryway with her forehead against the wall, overcome by a sadness almost too intense to handle.
Everything had been going so very well, and now this.
When his footsteps stopped outside, she opened the door and took Dina’s leash out of his hand. She nodded at the bags and said it was best for everyone that he go back to his South Harbor place to sleep.
Eik looked at her dejectedly and nodded back. He grabbed the bags and herded Charlie back down the steps. “See you tomorrow,” he said. He glanced back at her through the balusters of the banister. “It made me happy when I heard you’d come over there.”
Louise stood listening to his footsteps for a moment as they disappeared down the stairway. Then she closed the door and went inside to call Camilla to tell her they’d found Eik and she’d thrown him out. She needed to cry. To be angry and dejected.
11
February 1996
This was exactly what wasn’t supposed to happen,” Sofie said, when her family doctor joined her in the hospital lounge. She had been parked there with a cup of coffee while her mother was being washed and turned.
Else Corneliussen swept her blond pageboy behind her ears and sat down beside Sofie. The home care aide had phoned and said she’d found her mother dead in the bedroom. She’d also found a farewell letter to Sofie in the living room, and a water glass and a saucer stood on the night table. The empty pill bottles were beside the letter, so there would be no doubt about what had taken place. That she’d wanted to die.
But her mother wasn’t dead. Either she had been found too early or the pills weren’t strong enough. Maybe they were too old? Sofie didn’t know. She was so angry
at herself for not helping her mother. For not making sure she’d taken enough. Now she lay unconscious in her room.
“She wanted so much to die,” Sofie said.
The doctor nodded. “How do you feel about your mother trying to take her own life?” She walked over and closed the door to the hallway; nurses coming in for the evening shift were walking by. She sat down.
“I’d accepted it,” Sofie said. “We talked about it several times. It was difficult, right up to when I realized the alternative was so painful and miserable, that in a way it was worse than losing her. That’s when a person understands, that’s when you set her free. Out of love and respect, I think. But of course it was hard in the beginning when she talked about it. I didn’t want to lose her. I wanted her to be with me. But finally I realized I was thinking of myself, not her.”
Restless now, Sofie walked over to the window. A small, closed courtyard with raised beds and meticulously pruned bushes lay below; in the light from the offices on the other side of the courtyard, the bushes looked like black paperclips. “You know how much pain she was in.” She turned to the doctor. “She was exhausted all the time. She couldn’t get around because of her difficulty walking. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen, that’s all.”
She paused a moment. When she had stopped by her mother’s apartment earlier that day, her blanket lay on the sofa as if she had just gotten up. She turned back to the doctor. “Do you think she was afraid when she took the pills?”
Dr. Corneliussen shook her head. “I think your mother felt at peace. She was setting herself free.”
Sofie nodded. “I’ve always feared the day it would happen. The day she didn’t answer when I called, like I usually do in the mornings. She was hanging around only for my sake, she knew how unhappy I’d be. But I did manage to convince her that I was ready to let her go. She said it herself, in just the right way: ‘I’m not myself anymore.’”
The doctor nodded. She seemed to know exactly what Sofie meant. “If your mother wakes up, we will find a nursing home for her.” It was still too early to know if she would regain consciousness. “She won’t be returning to her apartment; you should prepare yourself for that.”
“That can’t happen, it can’t! I won’t have her stuck in some nursing home where she has to be fed every day. It would be so much against her wishes.”
The doctor took her hand and pressed it. “I agree, one hundred percent. I’ve also spoken to your mother about these things. Several times. In fact, I expected her to ask me to help her get the right pills. And I would have helped, I want you to know that. But I couldn’t offer to do it, she had to ask.”
Sofie turned to her. “Would you?”
The doctor nodded again. “I know her wishes, and I also know she doesn’t want life-prolonging treatment or to be kept alive by artificial means. But it’s possible she didn’t want to ask me, she knew it would put me in a dilemma, given my oath as a doctor.”
“You should have helped her.” Sofie said this quietly; mostly she was annoyed with herself. Why hadn’t they talked about this before now, when they both would have helped? “Can we do it now, so she doesn’t go through all this if she wakes up?”
The doctor’s expression was grave. “I believe it’s everyone’s right to choose when they no longer want to live.” She folded her hands in her lap. “When it comes to illness and age, I mean. When pain dominates and the will to live disappears. Or when they are entering a life without dignity. But to keep my opinion within professional limits, such a request has to come from the patient. On the other hand, as I said, I have spoken to your mother about it…”
Of course, Sofie thought. No one can suggest to another person that they die. “Will you help if I’m the one who asks? Will you help her to die?”
They looked at each other for a moment, then the doctor nodded. “But you’re not the one I’m helping,” she emphasized. “It’s your mother.”
Sofie felt something loosening up inside. She squeezed the doctor’s hand. “How?”
“It’s not something we can talk about,” Dr. Corneliussen said. She stared until Sofie got the message. “But your mother won’t be alone when she passes away.”
12
Come on, for Chrissake!” Camilla Lind leaned over the table in the editorial conference room. “It’s a damn good story when a Danish woman disappears for eighteen years and suddenly shows up dead in England—murdered, and the police have absolutely no motive for the killing.”
She ignored everyone around the table except Terkel Høyer, but the editor in chief didn’t look convinced. “Let’s put a hold on this,” he said. “Because they don’t have a clue as to motive, we can’t know if the killing has anything to do with her past here in Denmark.”
“No!” Camilla said. “But aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know who she was, what she’s been doing all these years, all this time when her loved ones thought she’d drowned?”
Ole Kvist, a seasoned crime reporter for Morgenavisen, finally woke up. “I could fly over there. I could try to interview the husband and daughter.” No doubt he was eyeing the possibility of a few days in southern England, all expenses paid.
Camilla sighed. “We already know all that, damn it. You’ve already stolen it from the English newspapers. Focus on the woman, not the case, that story is history.”
The first thing she had noticed when she returned to the paper was that not much had changed in the years she’d been gone. She wanted to do personal stories. Kvist wanted to travel and have the paper foot the bill. Only Jakob, who had been a trainee back then, showed the drive she’d had when she began as a reporter in Roskilde. But he was covering gang warfare, so he had more than enough to do.
“The police raided Christiania again last night,” he said, when it was his turn to report. “Hashish, cash, gold bars. The value of what they confiscated is being totaled up this morning, and I’m in contact with the special operations leader.”
Camilla leaned back and listened as Kvist spoke with renewed energy about flying to Bristol and seeing what he could dig up. She shook her head when Høyer told him to take it up with the international editor; they might have a man free in London, and it would be cheaper to send him out.
“The flight isn’t over five hundred eighty-five kroners, round-trip,” Kvist said. “That’s less than a train ticket from London.”
“Maybe.” Høyer didn’t even bother to look up. “But he wouldn’t have extra travel expenses on Crime’s budget.”
Camilla left as soon as the meeting broke up. She was standing outside Høyer’s office when he came down the hallway. “It’s a damn good story for Sunday, a feature on the Danish woman,” she said, before he reached the door. “We need to get over to Jutland, see where she comes from, find out who she was, why she disappeared. Find out what happened. Did you know she was married to a pastor before she disappeared?”
Høyer sat down and pointed to the chair across his desk. “I don’t have the staff to do this type of story anymore. You know that, even though you’ve been gone. We’re battling the online edition all the time; I have to deliver to justify our existence. This type of background story takes up resources I don’t even have.”
“That may be. But you’ll lose ground if you give up the good stories.”
“They take too much time.”
“Then I’ll do it myself,” she said. “I’ll do it on the weekend.”
Høyer shook his head, though with a hint of a smile. “As long as you know I can’t give you travel expenses; no meals or anything.” He was back to looking like a man under pressure.
“All expenses are on me.” Ironic, she added, that since she was no longer a freelance journalist, now that she was an actual employee, he, of course, wouldn’t have to pay for the articles she delivered.
Camilla left the office feeling she had prostituted herself. But she simply couldn’t let go of the story. And it was possible that her determination came from wanting to s
atisfy her own curiosity. On the other hand, she probably wasn’t the only one interested in uncovering the woman’s background. But she’d said nothing about the inside source she might be able to use if the background story was too thin.
On her way back to the office, she felt the old familiar tug of excitement. She was going out in the field, and she was so excited about the story that she caught herself smiling, despite having two articles by Kvist to edit and an email to answer from a freelancer in southern Zealand who was in an uproar because she’d changed the headline of his article. “Pushers Have Captured Lolland,” he had called it, and an irritated Camilla wrote that the damn pushers have always been there, that he had to come up with something better. Now he was sore, and she had to smooth things over. But Morgenavisen wasn’t going to be ridiculed for seemingly believing that hashish had first showed up in the Danish South Sea islands in 2014.
13
Louise had cleared off Eik’s desk to ready it for Olle, who was moving in to help her on the case. She piled old case files on the shelves lining the rear wall of the office, then she folded up Charlie’s blanket and laid it out in the hall for Eik to take back to his old office. Before she could text Olle to say that everything was ready for him, the telephone rang.
“Have you had a look at what I sent over?” Davies sounded excited.
She pulled her office chair out and sat down, and as she started her computer she said, “What exactly is it we’re talking about?”
“The bank statement! We discovered that the deposits made into Sofie Parker’s account all came from Danish account holders. It’s obvious from the account numbers. We’re still working on access to the Swiss account, and we’re in touch with Europol as well.”
“Interesting.” Louise asked if Eurojust had issued an international letter of request. When another EU country originated the request for information from a foreign bank, a Danish court order wasn’t sufficient to gain access.