“Who says he’s anything other than a fantasy? Not everything that crunches is candy. Not even Caroline has met him.”
“Twenty-one-year-old women don’t make up relationships. Maybe it was platonic or innocent, but there’s some man out there who made quite an impression on her. Enough to get a tattoo that had something to do with him.”
Anette tossed her cigarette onto the ground. They stayed like that next to each other for a moment without saying anything. Soaked in the sunshine and sounds of life and normalcy through their skin, before they had to go back to the gloomy parallel world of Homicide. Jeppe glanced down at the fallen flower petals and pigeon droppings in the gravel. At the moment, the combination seemed like a fitting image of Copenhagen: a mosaic of flowers and shit.
* * *
IN THE OFFICE at the very end of Homicide’s long, dark hallway, Torben Falck sat bent over his desk, his eyes so close to the computer screen that he looked like the before image for an optometry ad. Sara Saidani regarded him uncertainly from the doorway while she waited for him to notice her. His fat stomach bumped the edge of the desk, and a pair of bright green suspenders looked like they were working overtime to hold his pants in place. The office smelled of the pork sandwich that a pile of greasy wrappers on the desk revealed he had eaten for lunch.
After Sara had knocked twice without any response, she went in.
“Hey, Falck. Can I bother you for a sec?” She pulled a chair over and sat down next to him. He smelled slightly of fried food.
“Well, hello! Where’d you come from?” Falck grunted in surprise but with warmth in his voice.
Sara thought, and not for the first time, that Falck was the one of her new coworkers who she liked best. The others avoided her, as if she had broken some kind of unwritten rules she wasn’t even aware of. As if her foreignness were in the way. Not her cultural foreignness, for her new coworkers on Homicide seemed just as comfortable with Sara’s Tunisian background as had her colleagues back in Helsingør. It was her personality that seemed to get in the way. Sara didn’t drink coffee and rarely ate sweets. She didn’t laugh at crude jokes and didn’t like discussing politics. Refused to conform or curry favor, and went home early to spend time with her two daughters. The only person who didn’t seem bothered by her ways was Falck.
She nodded to him.
“I was just thinking that we might want to agree on who’s doing what. Have you started looking into Christian Stender?”
He smiled so his mustache curved like a wet broom.
“I’ve done a little digging. So far, I’ve primarily been looking into his finances and professional life. Stender appears to be an ambitious businessman with many irons in the fire. Sits on a number of boards and invests in everything from wind turbines to fast-food restaurants. He made most of his money by importing spare parts for BMWs. And he’s a bit of a patron of the arts who, among other things, donated several works to the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art.”
“Contemporary art?” Sara looked at him skeptically. “In Herning?”
“It’s apparently supposed to be quite nice. He’s opened and closed several businesses and also had a few go bankrupt. That kind of thing rarely makes a person popular. I’m looking into it in more detail, but it’s difficult material to get through, so it will take a little time.” Falck pushed a button and then cursed to himself as his screen went black.
“Fast-food restaurants and fine art museums. How do those go together?”
“How do I get the picture back?” He looked at her helplessly. Sara made an adjustment and brought Falck’s virtual desktop back into place. “Ah, there! Thank you. I wonder if Stender doesn’t make his money on the one and then do the other for the prestige? That seems to be quite a common way to go about things. All the nice things on display and the crude stuff in the basement.”
“But could there really be a link between his business and his daughter’s death?” Sara bit her lower lip as she contemplated this. “A financial act of revenge in the form of brutal murder and mysterious carvings on the body’s face? I don’t buy that.”
Falck looked past her, and Sara turned around. Thomas Larsen was standing in the doorway right behind her, smirking.
“Yes?” she said, raising her eyebrows.
“I ran a background check on Kristoffer Gravgaard. It was quite interesting.” He detached himself from the doorway, came over to the desk, and sat down on it so he could look down at them while he spoke. “Grew up in a poor suburb with a mentally ill single mother, who was forty-three when she had him. Lord knows how that happened. Every other weekend with a relief family, disability pension, Christmas help from the Salvation Army, and so on, you know the drill. The relief family filed the first report with the municipality when Kristoffer was three years old. The mother’s new boyfriend had hit the child, and he showed up for his weekend visit with marks all over his body. We’re talking about massive child neglect and abuse from the very beginning.”
“But not enough to remove him from the home?” Sara asked, without skipping a beat.
Larsen continued undaunted. If it worried him that he was interrupting their conversation, he showed no sign of it.
“No,” Larsen said. “But more than enough to make him totally cuckoo, if you ask me. There are two notes from his school days. In the first one, he dismantled a locker room. In the second, he beat a classmate to a pulp because the kid was teasing him. That was in the fourth grade.”
“And?” Sara asked.
“And? He’s obviously unstable and had motive and opportunity to kill Julie. I think we should bring him in.”
Sara turned back to Falck. “Where were we?” She couldn’t be bothered to waste time reminding Larsen that it was up to management who they brought in for questioning.
“That’s up to Kørner,” Falck said more accommodatingly. “Talk to him about it. I think he and Werner are on their way to see the parents at the hotel, but call him.”
Larsen kept sitting on the desk while Sara leaned over Falck’s computer and started typing. She knew Larsen had come because he wanted recognition and support, but she wasn’t in the mood to give it to him. After a minute, he got up and left the office without saying goodbye.
Falck cleared his throat. “What do you call a fake noodle?” he asked.
Sara looked up at his round, friendly face and couldn’t help but smile.
“An impasta,” Falck said with a cheerful wink.
* * *
AT THE HOTEL Phoenix, Ulla Stender reluctantly agreed to sit in the hotel lobby with Anette so they could talk one-on-one while Jeppe questioned Christian Stender in their room.
Jeppe shifted on the stiffly upholstered yellow silk sofa and watched Stender pacing restlessly back and forth across the thick carpet. He looked better today. Dressed in a dark gray suit—which fit his corpulent figure fairly well but showed signs of wear at the elbows and knees—and sensible shoes, his thinning hair plastered down with some kind of strong hair care product. Not the wreck of a man they had met yesterday, but with the same panicky look in his eyes.
“How long do you expect us to stay in Copenhagen? I can’t stand sitting around in this damned hotel room, waiting and waiting. We need to arrange Julie’s funeral. And now this photo of her mutilated face is showing up everywhere. How the hell does that happen?! Tell me, what are you guys doing to find her murderer?”
Stender downed a glass of clear, bubbly liquid, some kind of effervescent antacid, presumably, and glared at Jeppe, as if he were used to having his questions answered.
“It’s good to see that you’re doing a little better today, Mr. Stender. Could you please sit down?”
Stender sat on the very edge of a deep armchair, seemingly ready to leap up and start pacing again any minute.
Jeppe spoke with all the authority he could muster.
“In homicide investigations like this, the body isn’t released until the final autopsy report is filed. That may well take a couple of
days. After that you and your wife will be given permission to take your daughter home and bury her. I certainly understand that it’s unpleasant to be forced to stay in a hotel in this situation, but we need you here. We want nothing more than to find the killer and close the case as soon as possible.”
“My daughter.” Christian Stender spoke without looking up.
“I’m sorry?”
“My daughter. Julie was my daughter, not Ulla’s.”
“How do you mean?” Jeppe leaned forward on his elbows, his lower back already hurting from trying to sit up in the deep sofa.
“When my first wife, Irene, was dying, I promised her I would look after our daughter. Ulla has been very supportive, both to me and to Julie, but she’s never been a mother to her, more of a… a pal. Do you have children?”
Jeppe shook his head with the usual little pang in his heart.
“Then you don’t know what I’m talking about. A parent’s love for a child is unique. It’s the only unconditional love we humans can feel. It can never be the same for a stepparent.” He started to sound choked up.
Jeppe knew he had to change the topic if anything was going to come out of this questioning. Before Christian Stender completely fell apart.
“Did Julie have a boyfriend? Male acquaintances?”
“Oh, please!” He sounded offended. “You’re not going to pin this on my Julie being promiscuous or anything like that! My daughter wasn’t perfect, but she was a clever girl, she had ambitions. She didn’t move to Copenhagen to party and get drunk, even if that is obviously part of being young. She wanted to get an education, to be somebody.”
Jeppe nodded. “What about before she moved to Copenhagen? Any boyfriends or male friends in high school or from after-school activities? Did I hear something about her being involved in the theater?”
Christian Stender’s face tightened like a face-lift on fast-forward.
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
“I’m just trying to find out more about Julie’s past. We need to look into all possibilities. Was there a man in her life before she moved to Copenhagen?”
“Who talked?” His chin creased in an attempt to hold his rage at bay. “Was it that old bitch she rents from? Or is it Ulla, who can’t keep her mouth shut?”
It was obvious Jeppe was onto something. He took a chance.
“Tell us about him!” he urged. “It could be important.”
Christian Stender breathed deeply, his chest rising all the way up to his collarbone, and looked like he was having a hard time swallowing. Then he did something Jeppe had never actually seen happen before in real life: he raised his fist to his mouth and bit down hard on his knuckles.
Jeppe waited for a moment and then asked again. “At the current time all relationships Julie had are potentially critical. Who was he?”
Stender exhaled hard and shook his temperament back into place.
“He was Julie’s art teacher in tenth grade, Hjalte something-or-other, a goddamned shepherd from the goddamned Faeroe Islands. He started this drama club after school that put on all kinds of hippie plays, and of course Julie had to be part of it. She helped with the whole thing and wrote songs and short pieces for various productions. He was twenty-five years older than her, but that didn’t stop him from seducing her. Fucking illegal. I got him fired, of course.”
“When was all this?”
“Roughly six years ago. It was nothing, really nothing. Julie was a young, impressionable girl, and he exploited that. She was more fascinated by him than in love. Forgot him quickly.”
“So he moved away?”
“As far as I know he moved back home to the Faeroe Islands, fifteen hundred kilometers to the north, and good riddance. If he’d stayed I’d have ripped the guy’s balls off.”
Christian Stender seemed to suddenly remember to whom he was talking and gave Jeppe a mollifying look to indicate that it was just an expression.
“What did you say his name was?” Jeppe pulled out his notepad.
“I can’t remember. Hjalte, like I said, was his first name, his last name was something even more Faeroese-sounding. I’m sure he’s roaming the islands up there, tending sheep again—you know, a knitted-vest, bleeding-heart-liberal type of guy.”
Jeppe made a quick note and smiled at him.
“We came across a couple of bankruptcies on your rap sheet. Some kind of currency trading that didn’t go quite by the book?”
No reaction.
“Do you think you might have made enemies in your professional life?” Jeppe tightened his fingers around his ballpoint pen.
A flash of rage gleamed in Stender’s eyes, making him look like an Odysseus, who would only become stronger from navigating into a headwind. But the moment of strength passed quickly and was replaced by a sadness so massive that Jeppe could almost feel the pressure weighing down his own chest.
“You have a suspended sentence from 2008 for fraud,” he tried again.
Stender shook his head, resigned, his eyes looking tired and empty.
“That was nothing. Believe me, it can’t have anything to do with that. You’re looking in the wrong place.”
Tears started running down the father’s fleshy jowls. Jeppe watched him with growing impatience. However devastated he may be, there was something the man didn’t want to share, and it annoyed Jeppe that he couldn’t draw it out of him.
Stender wiped his cheeks with his fingers. He had a chunky gold ring on his right pinky finger. It looked like one of those ones people pressed into melted wax to seal a letter, like something out of a secret lodge.
“Lodge brother?”
Stender raised his eyebrows in response and checked his watch. It was obviously none of Jeppe’s business.
Jeppe got up and held out his hand.
“Call me if you think of anything else that might help our investigation. We’re doing everything we can to find your daughter’s killer. Everything we can.”
Anette was waiting in the lobby and looked like she had just sat through a half-hour-long lecture on bond interest versus redemption yield. Maybe it would have been smarter if they had traded places. Anette was not exactly compatible with finicky, provincial secretaries.
“Where’s Ulla Stender?”
She nodded toward the lobby restrooms.
“She’s been in there for ten minutes. If we don’t leave, I doubt she’ll ever come out again.”
Jeppe laughed all the way out to the car. The laughter was refreshing for them both, and Anette did her best to prolong their enjoyment. Only after she had cursed Herning, the secretarial profession as such, and suburban wives per se, was she ready to exchange information in earnest.
“There’s no doubt who wears the pants in the Stender household. She does everything he asks, and he seems to utilize his power to the fullest. And Lord knows I would, too, if I were married to her!”
“If he’s hard on her, then he could also be to Julie. Violent even. Or what?”
Anette braked for a bicyclist who crossed full speed against the red light and yelled a string of curse words after him out the window.
“It’s not impossible, but I actually don’t think so. Julie basked in the glow of his attention, whereas Ulla lives more in the shadows. If anyone would have wanted to murder Julie, it’s Ulla, not Christian.”
Driving past the Copenhagen canals, Jeppe told Anette what he had learned about Julie’s lover. On the stone steps along the water, people sat squinting and smiling up at the midday sun. In pause mode with a beer and no plans for the rest of the day, light-years from the intense atmosphere inside the Ford.
“We need to find out who this Hjalte is and where he is now,” Jeppe said. “He was an art teacher at Vinding School until six years ago. We need to call someone who knows the Stender family and may have witnessed the affair close-up. Caroline. Or maybe her mother, Jutta.”
“I’ll call her,” Anette said with a nod. “Can you send me her number?”
They stopped at a red light by the National Museum. Jeppe pulled out his cell phone and sent Anette the contact information. Just as he was about to put the phone back in his pocket, it rang. This time he answered it.
“Kørner speaking. Hello, Esther… I don’t understand…” Jeppe listened to the elderly woman’s confused explanation but only understood that it was important. “I’ll be right over,” he said, quickly unbuckling his seat belt.
“I’m getting out. There’s news from Klosterstræde—see you back at HQ in an hour.” Jeppe ignored Anette’s surprised stare and slammed the car door shut behind him before he began to trot back along Stormgade. He could sense her eyes in the rearview mirror and knew how annoyed she was with being left out of the action. Too bad. She would just have to wait.
CHAPTER 13
Esther de Laurenti sat in the middle of her living room floor with her computer in front of her, eyeglasses perched on the end of her nose and a stack of densely written pages spread over the Esfahān rug. The dogs lay contentedly snoring on top of each other in their basket, and the apartment exuded peace, idyllic in the warm midday light.
An unpleasant dream had woken her up at dawn. She had been standing in muddy water up to her knees, looked down, and realized that blood was pouring down her legs. She had lain in bed for a long time, clutching the mattress, until she was fully awake and could relax again.
It was a familiar nightmare, one which she had learned to suppress over time, but today she had woken up to a reality that was even more nightmarish. She had refused at first to accept any link between the book and Julie’s death, but she couldn’t deny it any longer. The online papers spoke their own clear language; the gruesome picture of Julie’s desecrated face had decided matters.
She rummaged around in the stacks of paper in front of her and pulled out a page.
She meets him again the following week. This time, he’s standing right behind her when she closes the front door and turns around. He is only slightly taller than her, but with strong shoulders and a broad back. His eyes twinkle mischievously behind the lenses of his glasses. He holds his hand out to her, and she takes it without hesitation.
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