The Lost Woman

by Sara Blaedel

  She explained how Jonas had resuscitated one of their neighbors. “He was shook up all weekend. Maybe he’s even been in shock. You’re all aware that he lost both his parents. You could even say it’s my fault that he suddenly decided to smoke. I should have kept him home until he’d had time to deal with what happened to him. But Jonas didn’t want any absence on his record, and insisted on returning to school. You can’t throw him out. Can’t you just give him a warning?”

  “We have to be consistent in how we treat our pupils,” the vice principal said. “Others have been sent home for smoking; it wouldn’t look good to make an exception in his case. We all like Jonas very much, he’s a great kid. That’s why we’re so disappointed in his actions.”

  Louise sensed the vice principal was loosening up a bit, though it still didn’t sound like she might change her decision.

  “We’re having a special meeting this afternoon with the two students’ contact teachers, so we’ll have to see what happens. My very best advice is for Jonas to immediately write a letter to the principal, to describe the episode with your neighbor and try to convince us why we should keep him on. But I can’t promise it will help. Our principal makes these decisions, not me.”

  Louise cursed after she hung up. She had considered asking Kim to drive up to get him, but now she dropped the idea. This was something she had to go through herself, together with Jonas.

  * * *

  By the time she turned off the freeway at Holbæk to get to Odsherred, the shock was gradually wearing off. She was starting to get good and pissed off. Not at Jonas, but at the school’s rigid principles. Of course they had rules and prohibitions, she respected that fully. At the same time, though, she was having doubts about her son staying at the school, even if they permitted him to. Jonas hadn’t hit anyone, he hadn’t bullied anyone, hadn’t stolen anything, which in Louise’s book were much more serious offenses than a sixteen-year-old smoking a cigarette because he felt terrible about something.

  “No way,” she said out loud. This school wasn’t for him. If a student who normally behaves himself—takes care of his schoolwork and is a good classmate—can’t make a single mistake when he’s under considerable pressure, without being punished so severely that he has to leave the school immediately—that school’s values were too different from hers. If Jonas had been a troublemaker, a bad student, and a bad classmate, clearly he should be thrown out. But damned if she and Jonas were going to crawl on their knees and beg them to take him back. The only stupid mistake she could see he’d made was not getting farther away to smoke.

  On the last stretch of road, she was stuck behind a red Toyota that slowed when they neared the boarding school. Probably the parents of the other boy who broke their smoking rules, she thought.

  Her son was standing out in the school’s parking lot when she parked beside the red car. Several of his classmates were there to give him a hug and say good-bye to him. Seeing his face made Louise sad. He looked white as a sheet among all his friends.

  She said hello to the other boy’s father, but the mother ignored her. She strutted over to her son without a glance at Jonas or the others in the group, as if everything was Jonas’s fault.

  Before Louise reached Jonas, he grabbed his bag and started toward her. A man with unruly curly hair approached her from the other side. Louise hadn’t seen him before, but he seemed to be on the verge of tears. He reached for Louise’s hand and said he was Jonas’s French teacher and that he was terribly sorry for what had happened. He couldn’t at all understand how Jonas could have done what he did. And again it was as if her son at the very least had robbed the local bank or committed a serious assault.

  “I sincerely hope he’ll think about his actions.”

  Louise almost replied, but instead she studied him for a moment. Was he being ironic behind those curls? But all she saw was a very sad expression.

  “I’m sure he will,” she said, though mostly she wanted to argue for some sense of fair-mindedness.

  “Are we ready?” Jonas said. He’d already thrown his bag into the car and was getting in.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said, as they headed back toward the freeway. “I feel bad about what I did.”

  “It was dumb,” Louise said, “but it wasn’t any worse than that.”

  She felt his eyes on her, but she kept staring straight ahead at the road. There was no reason for him not to feel sorry for acting so dumb, she thought. Even though she felt the school had overreacted.

  A while later he asked, “How’s Melvin? Have you been in to see him?”

  Louise nodded. “He’s conscious now, and thanks to you it doesn’t look like he’s going to have any permanent damage from the heart attack.”

  “So he’s going to be okay?” He was very worried, that was obvious.

  “It seems that way. He’s tired, but it looks like he’s doing fine. It wouldn’t surprise me if the hospital released him soon. But he’s going to have trouble walking up the stairs to the fourth floor,” she added. She asked Jonas where he learned first aid.

  “There at boarding school.” They had taken a two-day first-aid course before Christmas, he said.

  At least the school had been good for something, she thought, though she was still pissed off. Maybe she was being unfair, though. Jonas had been so happy at the school, and the teachers had been so much more committed than last year, back in lower secondary school. She probably just needed to calm down.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” she said, taking advantage of the mood of openness between them.

  “I’ve only done it a few times.” He looked down at his hands, as if he expected to be bawled out or be sternly told to forget about getting a driver’s license.

  Instead, she asked, “You want to drive by the hospital and see Melvin?” She slipped into the outer lane of the freeway.

  “Yeah, thanks.” He asked if she’d heard from Eik.

  Louise thought shortly about telling him that Eik was in jail in England, but she decided he could do without knowing that for now. He had enough on his plate.

  She clenched her teeth. She didn’t even know if she would ever see Eik again. In private life, that is. She knew what had come between them, but she still hadn’t considered what it meant for their relationship.

  “Can you remember Melvin’s ward?” she asked, trying to hide how badly she felt that Eik had kept something vitally important a secret from her—that the girlfriend he reported missing eighteen years ago had been alive.

  Jonas nodded and said he still had the slip of paper with Melvin’s ward and room number written on it.

  “Think it over about that letter to the principal,” she said an hour later, when she let him off at the hospital.

  * * *

  Louise had cleared the table after dinner and was about to plop down on the sofa when Camilla called. Louise had given Jonas permission to visit a friend from his old school. Maybe she should have grounded him for breaking the boarding school’s rules, but when he came home from the hospital, he looked overwhelmingly relieved at not losing another person he was close to. She didn’t have the heart to discipline him.

  “What are you doing?” Camilla asked.

  “I’m down for the count,” Louise said.

  “How about a beer at Svejk?”

  “Now? No way, it’s Monday! Today has been totally insane, and I don’t feel like talking about it.”

  “I really need a beer,” Camilla said. She explained that she’d just returned from Zurich. “And I know what Sofie Parker did all those years when no one knew where she was.”

  “I don’t give a damn about Sofie Parker! I don’t want to hear one more word about her.” Louise wasn’t sure if her outburst came from Eik’s contact with his ex-girlfriend or if she just felt snubbed by Eik’s returning to England without her knowing what the hell was going on.

  Suddenly the words gushed out of Louise’s mouth like a bucket turned upside down. She told Camilla abou
t Eik and his arrest, then about Melvin being hospitalized.

  “And now Jonas has been booted out of boarding school for smoking a cigarette,” she added.

  “Yeah, I know. Markus texted me. He thinks it’s so unfair.”

  “It is, too.” Louise’s heart sank. “I can’t understand why they don’t take into account what he’s just been through.”

  “I really think you’d like to hear what I found out,” Camilla said, her voice even. “Maybe it can help clear things up a bit for you.”

  Louise sighed. “Yeah, maybe I do need a beer after all. I’ll meet you there.”

  * * *

  “Where’s Frederik?” Louise asked, as they sat in a corner with two tall, foamy Czech beers.

  “He flew to Los Angeles to meet the producer and studio people who are making the TV series.”

  Louise took a sip of beer. What she wanted most was to just sit with her old friend and make small talk. About whatever. “Unbelievable that they kick someone out for one single mistake.” She asked if Markus was doing well at boarding school.

  Her friend nodded. “He has a girlfriend up there who’s suddenly the most important thing in the world. You can’t tear him away. He stayed this weekend, too.”

  Louise smiled. Jonas had mentioned that. His friend and his blond Julia had become inseparable, and Louise sensed it was beginning to wear on her son.

  “What the hell is going on with Eik?” Camilla leaned over the table. “They can’t charge him with murder!”

  Louise stared down at her beer, turning it in her fingers. “Actually I think they can. Especially if he doesn’t have a really good explanation for turning up at the crime scene twice now, and why he sent threatening emails to the victim. The police over there also know Eik was with Sofie right before she disappeared, so you can’t blame them for putting him at the top of their list.”

  “Threatening? How?”

  Louise shrugged. “Dunno. I didn’t even know the two of them had been in contact after she disappeared. In fact, I wasn’t even aware that he knew she was alive.”

  “And when exactly did it happen?” Camilla hadn’t even touched her beer. “When did she disappear, I mean.”

  An image of Eik suddenly popped up in Louise’s head, and she felt leaden, sad. His dark, longish hair, blue eyes, sharp cheekbones. It all came at her at once; she’d thought she’d found her man, but now the dead woman had taken him from her.

  “Honestly, Camilla. It’s just too much for me to talk about now. I feel terrible.”

  “When exactly is it that no one knows where she was?” Camilla asked, as if she hadn’t heard her.

  “From the summer of 1996, when she disappeared, until she met Nigel Parker in the spring of 2000.”

  “I can clarify that. In September ’96, Sofie showed up at the suicide clinic in Zurich where I was today. She worked there as a volunteer until late 1999.”

  “Why was she there?”

  “To learn how to take people’s lives, is the short version.”

  Louise didn’t understand. She looked at her friend.

  “When I looked up her first husband,” Camilla said, “the pastor in Jutland, we talked about her mother’s suicide. Or attempted suicide, I should say. She tried to kill herself, but ended up as a vegetable in a hospital bed. She didn’t die until the local doctor gave her a helping hand.”

  Louise sat motionless, her hand on the fogged-up beer glass.

  “Sofie and her husband had it out,” Camilla said. “He refused to bury her mother because of her attempted suicide and the help she finally got in dying. He condemns suicide, he believes only God can decide when our time is up, but Sofie supports the right to choose. I think she felt let down by her husband, big-time. I have to admit, talking with him made me think a lot of things over. It’s damn interesting, and it’s an important dilemma, too. I can understand her preoccupation, after experiencing the dilemma firsthand. And that must have motivated her to stay in Switzerland.”

  “Who was the doctor that helped her mother die?”

  “I found her name, Else Corneliussen, but she moved away shortly after Sofie’s mother died. I’ve tried to find her, but no one knows where she moved to, and anyway it was a long time ago. It seems the pastor drove her away. Maybe he threatened to report her for euthanasia or accessory to murder.”

  Louise folded her hands pensively.

  “But there’s something else,” Camilla said. “I think Eik is the father of Sofie’s daughter. And if he is, I can damn well understand his going over to be there for her, considering what she’s been through. The girl was born six months after Sofie started at the Swiss suicide clinic. That was in March or April of 1997.”

  Neither of them spoke as they counted the months backward.

  “Damn,” Louise mumbled. She stared into space for a moment while gathering her thoughts. Eik had a daughter! Now that she thought about it, they did resemble each other. Dark hair, the eyes, the brash attitude. Why didn’t she notice it before, and why the hell hadn’t that idiot told her?

  “Hello, anyone home?” Camilla said.

  Louise nodded distractedly, then she excused herself and walked outside to call Rønholt.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said, before she could explain why she was calling so late. “I just read through the correspondence between Eik and Sofie Parker. Apparently the two of them had a child. I thought you should know, because it puts their connection in a different light.”

  “I know about it. And now you’ve just confirmed it. What I don’t understand is, why didn’t he say anything?” Louise shuddered; it was freezing out there. Two young guys in big coats had stepped outside to smoke. They casually checked her out before turning their backs.

  “I don’t think he knew about it until recently,” he continued. “Four months ago, Sofie emailed him and said she wanted to meet. Two weeks went by before he wrote back, he said he wasn’t interested, that she didn’t exist to him. And that’s all he wrote.”

  “He didn’t ask why she suddenly contacted him? And where she’d been all these years?” Louise stepped aside to let the two men go back inside. Through the window she noticed Camilla sitting with her phone in her hand, apparently texting someone.

  “No, his answer was short. He wanted nothing to do with her. The fact that he waited two weeks indicates that he thought everything through before answering her. But then she wrote him again, a long email. She didn’t blame him for not wanting anything to do with her after so many years, but it wasn’t about them. She informed him they had a daughter who needed to meet her father.”

  Rønholt cleared his throat. “Eik didn’t take that well. I’ll spare you the details of the email he sent back to her. Let’s just say it could be read as brutal and threatening. Sofie then wrote another long email. She grilled him about his life, his work, whether he was married, his family, his apartment—all sorts of things. As if she had to approve him before deciding to allow him contact with his daughter.”

  “And that pissed Eik off,” Louise guessed.

  “Yes, you could say that. He demanded to know where they lived, but Sofie wouldn’t tell him. She hadn’t told her husband about tracking down her daughter’s father. She and Nigel Parker had apparently agreed that he would be Stephanie’s father, even though she was born before they met. That’s what he told the English police, anyway. He’d promised Sofie not to tell Stephanie he wasn’t her biological father. At some point Sofie decided to take her daughter to Copenhagen to meet Eik. But of course he didn’t want to wait, he wanted to see his daughter immediately.”

  “Do we know why she suddenly thought it was time for the two of them to meet?” Louise’s anger with Eik was slowly seeping away.

  “It appears the girl and her stepfather didn’t get along. Possibly that’s why Sofie thought it would be good for her daughter to meet her biological father. In hopes that they would get along better.”

  “So it was because of the daugh
ter that Eik dropped everything and flew over there, when he heard that Sofie had been shot,” Louise surmised.

  “Probably. I’ve put in a request to talk to him over the phone. Hopefully we’ll know more then. Also about why he went over there the second time.”

  Louise shook her head when Camilla signaled through the window, asking Louise if she wanted her coat brought out to her. The last time she’d seen Eik had been in the Search Department’s lounge. He’d seemed distracted and distant since she’d thrown him out of the apartment. She’d believed his distraction came from their breakup, when his thoughts had of course been with his daughter in England. She’d been so self-centered. But why hadn’t he said anything? He could have let her in on the situation.

  “I think I know why he went back to England,” she said. “He overheard my conversation with Ian Davies, when he told me that Stephanie had disappeared and the police were looking for her, because she’d seen the killer and possibly could identify him. They feared she was in danger, and I think he went over there to protect her. But he can’t do that sitting behind bars. Damn!”

  For a few moments they mulled over what they had learned.

  “You’ve got to go over there and try to straighten things out,” Louise said. “There’s a small chance they’ll believe you more than they believe him.”

  “First, I’ll see if I can talk to him, hear his side of things. Don’t forget, they believe they have good reason to suspect he’s guilty of murder. Which is why they aren’t being very cooperative.”

  Louise paced up and down the sidewalk to keep warm. “If they intend to pin this killing on Eik, we’re going to have to find out who really killed Sofie Parker.” She stepped back to the bar’s entrance, which was partially shielded from the wind. “I sent the English police the list of names of those who deposited money in the Swiss account, but I don’t know if they’ve followed that up.”

  “I doubt it, now that they have Eik,” he said, his voice spiritless.