Only One Life

by Sara Blaedel

  Flemming pulled the lamp closer and asked Louise to come closer.

  “Can you see those marks there? They appear to be identical. She was struck multiple times with a blunt object, which seems to have a distinctive appearance. It has two rounded protrusions spaced three centimeters apart.”

  “Do you have any guess what it might be?” Louise asked, cursing her own tiredness as Flemming shook his head.

  “Nothing other than the fact that it’s heavy and if you found the object of interest, I could easily tell you if it was the one.”

  “Well, then, that’s what I’ll try to do,” she said, smiling at him. “What about the cause of death?”

  He stood there looking at her for a moment before he answered.

  “Dicta Møller asphyxiated on the blood from the severe cranial lesions. It ran down into her throat as she lay unconscious in the parking lot.”

  Images from the crime scene pushed their way in front of Louise’s retinas, but she forced herself not to react, not to think about how long Dicta had lain dying in the parking lot, alone and without anyone coming to her aid. Louise took a seat on a stool by the wall while Flemming completed the exam. She didn’t get up until Mik put away his notes. Then she followed him down to the car in silence.

  Louise didn’t get back to the hotel until around 8:00 P.M. Before she went up to her room, she stopped in the restaurant to order a little food she could bring upstairs with her. When she and Mik had returned from Copenhagen an hour earlier, the others were already eating, but she had declined the invitation to join them. The image of Dicta was still too clear in her mind.

  Ultimately, however, hunger had won out and now she made her way up the stairs, balancing a brown wooden tray with a hamburger patty, boiled potatoes, and all the fixings.

  It was ten past three when she woke up with the tray on her stomach and the TV on. It was a miracle that the gravy and potatoes hadn’t tumbled onto the bed while she slept. She got up and brushed her teeth before climbing into bed again to sleep for the last few hours before the alarm clock went off at six-thirty.

  27

  THE NEXT MORNING WAS SET ASIDE TO question the photographer Tue Sunds. The questioning was going to take place at the Holbæk Police Station, so the plan was for Louise and Mik Rasmussen to pick him up in Copenhagen at eight and bring him out to the provinces. When she opened her eyes a couple of minutes after six-thirty, she fantasized for a minute about calling first just to make sure he’d be home, but she knew that idea was out of the question. Their arrival should catch him unawares. So she swung her legs out of bed and set her feet on the rough hotel carpet.

  She quickly made herself a cup of Nescafé with the electric water heater with which she’d equipped the room; then she was ready to meet her partner. They had agreed that he would pick her up in front of the hotel at seven.

  As Louise stood outside in the cold October morning air, she realized she had a couple of butterflies fluttering in her stomach. The drive to Copenhagen was going to be long, since she and Mik would be alone together in the car. The day before, Louise had dozed on and off, but today the silence in the car would be so oppressive there would be no way to keep it from feeling a little awkward, she thought, pacing a little to stay warm. The train station across the street was already in full swing. The waiting taxis had nothing to do, but the town’s commuters were busy trying to make their morning trains into the city.

  She waved at him when he pulled over into the loading zone in front of the hotel, coming to a stop right next to the curb in front of her.

  He had brought freshly buttered morning rolls with a thermos of coffee. The milk was in a little Tupperware pitcher, and she smiled at him when he told her to help herself. She hoped to herself that he had inherited the pitcher from his mother. There was just no way she was going to have a thing with a man who bought himself Tupperware products, she thought, ruefully acknowledging that she might already have done precisely that.

  “How thoughtful. Did you get up early?” Louise asked, and by the time she had poured coffee for both of them, Mik was already heading down Roskildevej toward the highway at a decent pace.

  “Yeah, you could say that,” he said with fatigue and explained that one of the puppies had been having stomach trouble all night and had had diarrhea all over the hallway and kitchen.

  “It’s unbelievable what all can fit into such a small tummy,” he said. “But the little guy was whimpering so much that in the end I had to call the vet.”

  Louise looked at him with concern and offered to drive, because now that made it two nights in a row he hadn’t gotten more than a couple of hours of sleep, but he shook his head and said that he still had a little bit of charge left in his batteries.

  “How’s the puppy now? Is he doing any better?” It was hard not to be concerned about the little furball.

  “He was sleeping when I left,” Mik said and added that he’d enlisted his neighbor, who would look after things until he got home.

  Louise smiled at him. After all that, he’d still managed to bring coffee and rolls for them. She gradually started to relax.

  It was five minutes to eight when they rang the doorbell of Tue Sunds’s large penthouse apartment, which was unsurprisingly located in the heart of an exclusive part of the inner city, right up under the roof of an old red building on Grønnegade. It was a combination apartment and photo studio, as far as Louise had understood from Dicta the night she picked her up in front of Holbæk Station.

  They had to ring the buzzer several times before the photographer came and opened the door, barefoot and dressed in a bathrobe. They’d obviously caught him in bed, and Louise had the fleeting thought that now she would be confronted with whatever new young model had taken Dicta’s place. But her thought was interrupted when Mik spoke.

  “Tue Sunds?” he asked.

  The photographer nodded.

  “We’re from the Unit One Mobile Task Force,” Louise continued, really pulling herself together to be polite. “We’re working on a serious murder case. Do you have anything against coming back to the station with us for questioning?”

  Sunds took a step back and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Yes, I do. Now just isn’t a good time,” he responded, shaking his head a little. “Can’t do it. I’ve got appointments all day.”

  “Would it be possible to move the appointments to another day?” Louise continued, in the same polite tone, avoiding looking at Mik.

  “No, it’s not something you can just rebook,” he said with a touch of condescension and amazement that she could even imagine his being a man with appointments that could just be changed at a moment’s notice.

  Now Mik took over. “Yes, well, let me phrase it this way. If you don’t accompany us of your own free will, we will be forced to place you under arrest.”

  Louise looked at her partner. There was quite a contrast between the cheerful, considerate side of him that she had begun to get to know—the way he treated the high-school teacher, herself, and, for that matter, his dogs—and the way he dealt with people professionally when it came to situations like this.

  “Then you’ll have to arrest me,” the long-haired photographer responded provocatively, his unwillingness radiating from him.

  “This pertains to Dicta Møller, who was found murdered in a parking lot in Holbæk yesterday morning,” Louise said. She hoped that opening the bag all the way would make him see that now was not the right time to be flexing his muscles. “We know you knew her, and that you were supposed to get together Saturday night, but that you canceled your get-together.”

  He seemed puzzled about how she knew this, but didn’t ask. Seething, he pulled his bathrobe tighter, like a coat.

  “Dicta?” he said, making them repeat that she was the one they were referring to.

  “You know the person we’re talking about?” Mik asked.

  The photographer responded with a nod and confirmed that he knew the girl, but said he di
d not know she’d been murdered. He also confirmed that he had canceled a get-together with her, but did not provide any more details.

  “It can hardly have escaped your notice that she died,” Louise interjected. “She is one of your models, and her face was in all the news broadcasts last night, and she’s front-page news today.”

  “I haven’t seen them,” he responded standoffishly, casting a glance down at the newspapers lying on his doorstep. One of his own photographs showed her young face. He walked over, picked up the papers, and started reading one.

  Mik took the newspaper out of his hand and said that he would accompany Tue inside his apartment while he put some clothes on.

  Louise was following Tue Sunds’s facial expressions with interest, but there was very little going on in that taut, polished, sunburned face. He’s older than you’d think, it occurred to her, guessing that the photographer wanted to appear younger than he really was. That being the case, the Bordeaux-and-black-striped terry cloth bathrobe didn’t suit him at all.

  He was more respectably attired when Mik came back down with him five minutes later. Once on the street, Louise climbed into the back seat with him. He didn’t ask what had happened to Dicta until they’d crossed Kongens Nytorv and were on their way along Kalvebod Wharf.

  “We’ll talk about that once we get to Holbæk,” Louise responded tersely.

  At first the photographer sat with his teeth clenched, watching the heavy morning traffic coming toward them, but once they were out on the highway, he leaned his head back and closed his eyes and sat like that, off in his own world, the rest of the way to Holbæk.

  Louise grabbed a mineral water, a pitcher of coffee, and two cups before walking in and turning on her laptop. She’d sent Mik home to check on his dogs and rest for a bit while she handled the questioning session with the photographer. At first her partner had been reluctant to accept the offer, but ultimately he’d conceded.

  Tue Sunds was pacing around restlessly when she entered the office. She asked him to have a seat and offered him coffee. As she poured, she asked if she could get him anything to eat. They had taken him right out of bed, so he hadn’t had any breakfast yet.

  He sat down and accepted her offer. Out in the hallway she ran into Velin and asked if he could bring some bread from the caféteria while she prepared to question the photographer who had taken the page-nine picture of Dicta. Five minutes later, there were two slices of French bread on a white paper plate, butter and marmalade each in small packets next to it, and they were ready to get started.

  “I’m rather surprised to be here,” Sunds started as he opened the butter packet. “I don’t have a damn thing to do with this case.”

  Louise could see that he was starting to build up some resentment, which she hurried to quash by saying that she didn’t think he did either.

  “Well, then, why am I here?” he asked.

  “Because I would really like to hear you tell me about your relationship with Dicta. You sent her some messages rejecting her quite cruelly last Saturday after you canceled your appointment, and you weren’t particularly eager to come when we asked you to.”

  “Yeah, but do you suspect I killed her? Because that’s totally absurd,” he continued. “It’s true that I wasn’t able to see her last Saturday after all, and maybe I was a little harsh when she didn’t seem to be getting the message, but I didn’t see her at all that day, so there’s no way I could have murdered her.”

  Louise let him talk for a bit until she asked him to tell her why she should believe that he hadn’t committed the murder.

  He was puzzled for a moment, but then started talking again.

  “First and foremost, I wasn’t in Holbæk. Besides that, I actually liked her.”

  Now this was starting to get interesting, Louise thought.

  “It would also be totally foolhardy to take the life of a model I actually thought I could make some money from,” he continued.

  Louise smiled at that last one, which was stated in a slightly milder tone, with a hint of irony.

  “Obviously,” she said. “And that’s exactly the type of thing that would help convince us that you’re not our murderer. So if you don’t have any objections, I’d like to ask you a few questions that might help me shed a little light on Dicta’s life and your relationship with her.”

  He nodded that that was fine. It would have been pointless for him to respond any other way, Louise thought.

  “How did you come to be in touch with Dicta Møller?” Louise asked after Tue Sunds had eaten both slices of bread. And when he didn’t respond, she continued, “How does a young girl with no contacts in Copenhagen find her way to you specifically? You’re not that famous, are you?” she asked and leaned back a little to take the sting out of her words.

  He cleared his throat before answering. “No, of course she didn’t know me.” He smiled with exaggerated modesty. “But I understood from her that she subscribes to both Sirene and Bazaar magazines, and I’ve had big fashion spreads in both magazines in the last few months. That’s where she came across my name, and with that information it wasn’t hard for her to find me online.”

  Louise was familiar with the two fashion magazines targeted at teenage girls.

  “So she called you?” she asked, looking him in the eye as he slowly nodded.

  “Yes, she called my studio.”

  “Is that normal, for young girls to call you that way? If that were the case, I’d imagine you’d probably spend all your time doing nothing other than taking calls from starry-eyed teenage girls.”

  He smiled a bit and shook his head. “It’s not normal at all. I thought it was quite impressive that she had the guts. They usually send their pictures to the modeling agencies. But Dicta wanted to hire me to shoot a few portfolio shots of her that she could use for submissions. She was very ambitious, and I could tell that she was really willing to fight to make her dream into a reality.”

  “What was she supposed to pay for them?” Louise wanted to know.

  “Normally six thousand Danish crowns. That’s the price for the shoot. But I said I’d do them for her for three thousand crowns. She paid for them with her confirmation money.”

  “And did she then owe you the other half?”

  Sunds fidgeted imperceptibly in the chair and let his hands rest on the desk. Then he shook his head. “No,” he replied. “There was nothing about how I’d bill her for the rest if she made it big. Three thousand crowns was the agreed price.”

  Louise sat for a little while, watching him, but couldn’t interpret his composed face as he sat there looking at her with his bright blue eyes. Then he leaned back and wove his fingers together behind his head.

  “What you’re really asking me is if I was expecting anything else from her because I offered to do her pictures for half price,” he said, and now he was the one whose eyes pierced Louise.

  She nodded and waited.

  He sat and thought for a moment before he again began to speak. “I have an eighteen-year-old daughter. I got divorced from her mother four years ago, and one of her friends was spending a lot of time at our house around that time. My own daughter never harbored any dreams of becoming a model. She wants to be a veterinarian and just started veterinary school, but her friend was very taken with the modeling world and used to tag along in the studio when I was working with professional models. I actually thought she was thinking about becoming a photographer, that’s why I let her watch. But she wanted to be a model and kept pressuring me to give her a break, like under the table, even though I explained that I couldn’t just start using a completely unknown girl when magazines booked me for an assignment. Besides, they choose their own models.”

  He paused for a moment before completing his story by explaining that one day his daughter’s friend had gone to the police and reported him for rape, and at the same time she let the story leak out. She couldn’t be charged with making a false statement because of her age, but she was examin
ed by a gynecologist and the exam showed that she wasn’t telling the truth. Although it happens that the hymen can remain intact after a rape, it is rare, and after the events she described it certainly wouldn’t have been possible.

  “I didn’t do anything more about it, apart from talking to her parents, because the most important thing for me was that they understood that the story was a lie. I’ve always gone out of my way to treat young models considerately.”

  Louise had a copy of the police report in front of her. Ruth had had it waiting when they got back from Copenhagen, and Louise could see that a caseworker had been there during the questioning, which was standard procedure whenever someone underage was involved. Something had obviously gone wrong in terms of updating the case, because it didn’t say anywhere in the paperwork that the preliminary charge had been found to be baseless.

  “There’s also a report of assault?” Louise said, pulling out another piece of paper.

  “The same day the girl went to the police, she sent an e-mail out to several of the magazines and papers I work for and to the biggest modeling agencies in the city, telling her story.”

  There was something generous about the way he talked about her, as if he didn’t really want to accuse her of such poor behavior.

  “She was a little girl, and my daughter’s friend. At that point, my daughter didn’t have any room for more upheaval in her life.”

  Louise was starting to get irritated, but reined herself in. He was almost being too selfless about what he’d been subjected to for Louise to take him seriously.

  “You beat a man down so severely that he was in the hospital for a long time with facial fractures,” she fished, to put an end to what she interpreted as a self-aggrandizing defense soliloquy.

  He nodded.

  “The story about the girl was making its way around the city. A few people knew how it all fit together. I got the girl’s parents to write a letter to the people the girl had contacted, in which they explained that the report was made up. But not everyone who had heard the story received such a letter and the incident you mention happened one night after I’d had a little too much to drink and was maybe a little touchier than usual, so it all got out of hand when another photographer started egging me on.”