The Butterfly House

by Katrine Engberg

  This case was turning into a regular disaster, and they hadn’t come even one step closer to solving it. The superintendent was talking about calling in reinforcements, whatever the hell that meant, and the media was hounding both her and him. He had better get ahold of Mosbæk and ask him to meet.

  Mosbæk was one of the police psychologists and, in Jeppe’s opinion, the best. Unfortunately he was also the psychologist Jeppe had personally consulted when his wife left him and life came crashing down on him a year and a half ago. Now Jeppe felt slightly embarrassed around him, the way you do when you’ve allowed yourself to be vulnerable with someone, but he would just have to suck it up. He needed to understand what could possibly be motivating the killer, and Mosbæk was the right person to consult.

  The surveillance team that had watched Bo Ramsgaard last night confirmed that he had not left his house on the outskirts of Østerbro from the time he came home from work on Tuesday afternoon until he had driven off in his car this morning. The car had been out in front of the dark house all night. Could he have snuck out the back door and climbed over the wooden fence between the small backyards of the terraced houses? Had he left by bike, maybe a cargo bike?

  Jeppe rubbed a hand over his face. The phone in his pocket rang and rang. He let it ring.

  Motive plus opportunity. Who, aside from Pernille’s father, had both?

  Isak Brügger was in a locked ward at Bispebjerg Hospital, so no opportunity. Sara had reached Kenny Ewald by phone early this morning and he was definitely in Manila, so no opportunity. There was still no sign of Marie Birch. He had asked Falck to put together a routine search for her.

  Heavy clouds gave the day a dark hue, but there was still a sharpness to the light over the lakes, forcing him to squint.

  Jeppe walked down the bank a little way. His mother had taught him that you think better when walking. And as long as you keep moving, you don’t sink, he thought laconically, kicking a pebble into the water and looking up at the clouds that might burst any minute. The wind was mild, unnaturally warm given the season.

  His phone buzzed again. This time he answered it.

  “Anette?! What do you want now?”

  “Is it true that a third body has been found in the Lakes? Oh, and hello to you, too.”

  “Tell me,” Jeppe said, kicking another pebble into the water. “Is there really nothing better for you to do than listen to police radio? But, yes. They found another body, so I’m a tad busy, as I’m sure you can imagine.…”

  “Who is it? Someone else from Butterfly House?”

  “Anette, I’m going to hang up in three, two,…”

  “Does the name Marie Birch mean anything to you?”

  Jeppe looked out over the lake with increasing impatience. “She’s one of the kids from the residential home. Why do you want to know?”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “No, she’s disappeared, possibly living at the Central Station. Anette, what do you need her for?”

  “I’ll tell you someday when you’re not busy. Tell Uncle Suspenders that I said hello!” She hung up.

  Jeppe stuffed the phone into his pocket, shaking his head, and walked back to the scene. He scanned the police group on the bank and found Falck by the car, busy scratching his ear.

  “Falck, we’re leaving! Where does Bo Ramsgaard work again? We need to talk to him.”

  “At the airport. You want to go there now? It’s rush hour.”

  “We have to muscle him a bit about this alibi. Let’s go!” Jeppe got into the car.

  Falck calmly fastened the suspenders to the waistline of his trousers and squeezed in behind the wheel.

  Jeppe let out a deep-felt sigh. Having Uncle Suspenders as a partner didn’t make investigating three brutal murders any easier. Maybe that was what the superintendent should be thinking of reinforcing.

  “Drive, Falck! Step on it, if you would be so kind!”

  Falck floored it, not realizing the car was still in neutral. Disoriented, he looked down the right side of his paunch toward the shift and in doing so the car veered left into the oncoming lane. Then it stalled.

  “Whoops. Give me two seconds.”

  Jeppe leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. If he counted slowly to a million, maybe they would make it by then.

  Falck swore at the car, got it going, and drove on at a speed that Jeppe, even with his eyes closed, identified as agonizingly tortoise-like. The phone buzzed in his pocket, probably his mother again. He really was going to have to explain to her that she couldn’t keep bothering him at work unless it was serious. He let it ring.

  After what felt as never-ending as a physics midterm, the car stopped.

  “I think we can park here. He works at the conveyer belt.”

  “You mean security?”

  “Yeah, the conveyer belt.”

  They got out of the car and walked into Terminal 3, where travelers circled around each other’s luggage carts, their eyes darting, confused, from sign to sign. At the security, Jeppe found an agent who lead them around the massive lines to checkpoint number six, where Bo Ramsgaard stood in a white uniform shirt and a dark blue tie, instructing people on what to put in which bin and how their toiletries should be in their own separate plastic bag. His tired curls and beard looked even more unruly in contrast to his streamlined uniform. He was not happy to see them.

  “We’re sorry to have to bother you here at work, but we need to speak to you. It can’t wait.”

  He didn’t respond, just flagged someone to take over the position he was manning, and walked off with a brief nod to his coworkers. Jeppe and Falck followed him into a small windowless staff room, its walls lined with artificial wood paneling, making the place look like a sauna.

  “What is it?” he asked. “I am only allowed a ten-minute break.”

  He sat down on top of the table that occupied most of the floor space in the room, thus making it impossible for Jeppe and Falck to do anything but stand uncomfortably just inside the door.

  An empathetic guy, Jeppe thought, would have let them sit, too.

  “Where were you last night?” he asked.

  “Home with Nathalie, our youngest. Why?”

  “Can your daughter confirm that?”

  “Of course.” He stroked his beard with thumb and forefinger. “What’s happened?”

  Jeppe saw no reason to tell him about Rita. Maybe they could trick him into saying too much in the event that he had something to hide.

  “That’s beside the point. You said that your wife was home in the evening and overnight both Sunday and Monday?”

  “No,” Bo Ramsgaard replied without hesitation. “You misunderstood. Lisbeth left for her retreat on Monday, but I was still home with my daughter every night this week. And last week, for that matter.”

  Jeppe hesitated. As long as the man maintained that he had been at home, there wasn’t much to be done about it. They had to get ahold of Lisbeth Ramsgaard’s meditation center in Sweden somehow. So far no one answered the landline, so they might have to send someone there in person. She could be complicit.

  “We’ve learned that Pernille’s caseworker, Kim Sejersen, died three years ago.” Jeppe crossed his arms over his chest. “What can you tell us about him?”

  “Kim was a talented social worker,” Bo Ramsgaard said, one of his eyes twitching a little. “We were grateful that he was supportive of our daughter and helped her so much. In the beginning at Butterfly House, with his help, she improved, gained weight, and was happier than she had been for a long time.”

  “And then?”

  “Yeah, then she had a panic attack and started losing weight again.…”

  Jeppe heard the catch in the father’s voice and wondered if all parents wouldn’t feel a compulsion to blame someone for their child’s suicide, anything but carry the weight of it themselves.

  “How did Kim die?” he asked gently.

  The father looked at them, like they ought to know. Maybe t
hey should have.

  “An accident, apparently he drowned.”

  Jeppe felt a tingle travel down his spine, as if a daddy longlegs had just run down his back.

  “That must have been hard for Pernille?” he asked.

  “Hard? These kids find it hard if something they didn’t expect is served for lunch. A death is a disaster.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that Kim’s death helped trigger Pernille’s suicide?”

  “Ugh, enough already!” Out of the blue, Bo slammed his fist down onto the table. “The problem wasn’t that Kim died, although it was a tough blow of course.”

  “What was the problem then?” Jeppe could tell that the father was growing seriously angry.

  “Just because we weren’t able to prove it at the time doesn’t mean that Rita and the rest of the staff didn’t share responsibility for Pernille’s death. They neglected their jobs. Maybe even worse than that! We just found out about it too late…”

  He buried his face in his hands, spoke into them.

  “When they autopsied Pernille the pathologists found fresh cuts in her arms. My daughter had cut in the past but had totally stopped. She was home on vacation until a week before her suicide and then there were no marks on her arms at all. She must have started cutting again after she went back to Butterfly House.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  The father shook his head resignedly, as if explaining was costing him all his energy, and he assumed that energy to be wasted.

  “It means that she started doing noticeably worse once she returned to Butterfly House. It means the staff didn’t tell us that she had started cutting again. Maybe because they weren’t aware that she was doing it or maybe they didn’t think it worth mentioning to us, but either is equally horrible. My daughter only held out for a week and then killed herself.”

  It was hot and stuffy in the little room. The smell of yesterday’s drinking mixed with the father’s gloom made it hard to breathe. Jeppe and Falck exchanged glances.

  “If you hear from your wife, ask her to contact us right away. We’ll let you get back to work. Thanks for your time.”

  Bo pointed his finger at them and hissed, “Ask Peter Demant what went on at that place! He has never been willing to talk to us about Pernille’s death. Why would he deny us that? Ask for access to my daughter’s medical records. I’ll give you permission.”

  “Okay…” Jeppe hesitated, wondering how to interpret that statement. A concrete tip or just the expression of a grieving parent’s desire for revenge?

  * * *

  “A COUPLE OF kroner for something to eat?”

  The man asking was surprisingly well dressed and no more than thirty, but his brown teeth and the smell of decay revealed that he was probably down on his luck.

  “Panhandling is illegal in Denmark, as I’m sure you know,” Anette Werner said, waving the man away as she tried to scan the chaotic bustle of life in Copenhagen’s main train station. “And what the heck are you going to buy for a couple of kroner anyway? That won’t even get you condiments at the hot dog stand.” She hadn’t been somewhere so crowded in a while and was out of practice with the noise and constant, unwanted bodily contact. “Hey, you, actually, wait! Come back! I have a question.”

  The man scowled at her and asked, “Are you a cop? How did I not guess that.…”

  “Do you know Marie Birch, a young girl, hangs out here sometimes?”

  He started to walk away again.

  “Hey, wait. This is for you!” She pulled a crumpled two-hundred kroner bill out of her pocket and held it out. The man snatched the bill so quickly, Anette didn’t even see it disappear.

  “I don’t know her. But if she seriously hangs out here, then you should check down in the arches.”

  “R-Chest, what’s that?”

  “Arches, A-R-C-H-E-S, down along the tracks by Vesterport Station, below the Palads movie theater. Check the arches! You’ll find everything under the sun down there. Walk down along track one and then toward Vesterport.”

  The man turned around and vanished neatly into the crowd of commuters. Ten seconds later he was gone.

  Anette walked toward the tracks. At a hot dog cart she bought a chili dog, which she gulped down on the escalator leading to the platform. It felt like old times. It felt good. She was supposed to have gone to infant swim class today, but Svend had given her a pass so that she could nap. Instead, here she was, for a moment feeling like her old self again. It was as good as sleeping, perhaps even better.

  Down on the platform she quickly checked for guards, then hurried into the tunnel under the actual station building. She had to cross the tracks and climb over an unambiguous NO ADMITTANCE sign, the platform tapering to a narrow walkway along the tracks, darkness closing in around her. Now and then a locked door appeared in the wall, covered with uninspired graffiti and lit by powerful outdoor lights. The sky became visible above her as she reached the open area by the station square, but then disappeared again as she continued underneath the Liberty Column and Hotel Royal.

  Anette walked with purpose, as fast as the narrow passage permitted. No one noticed her, no one yelled at her, though her being here was definitely off-limits.

  At Vesterport Station, the tracks once again ran out under the open sky. Anette walked alongside them, passing the arches in the concrete foundation that the panhandler had described. They appeared to have been modeled after those Roman aqueducts she had seen in school books ages ago.

  There were a lot of arches, close to twenty of them. In front of each arch was an illuminated advertising panel, although the ads had recently been taken down. Anette peered into the first arch and saw a space about a yard deep, which was completely empty. No sign of life. She continued, peeking into the next arch with the same result. An S-train pulled into the station. Anette kicked the illuminated panel, hoping she looked like someone who had a reason to be there. When the train drove on, she moved on to the next arch and then the next. Nothing hiding there other than dry leaves and empty beer cans.

  It wasn’t until the last arch before the bridge at Kampmannsgade that she found something. Two half-moon shaped openings in the wall with bars over them. Both were about thirty inches wide, but different heights: the first was five feet high, the second only about eighteen inches.

  She grabbed the bars in front of the tall opening, but they didn’t budge. The ones in front of the smaller opening, on the other hand, were on the verge of falling off. She pulled out her phone and shone a light into the darkness. A shaft ran ten or fifteen feet into the foundation, where it appeared to come to an abrupt end.

  Anette cursed. Her only choice was to crawl in and see if the shaft continued downward.

  She got on her stomach and wormed her way along, phone in hand. The dust made her nose itch, and her breasts weren’t crazy about being squashed into the hard concrete underneath. But the shaft did in fact open down into a little room, where she was just able to stand upright. Here she saw the first signs of life: plastic bags of clothes, a mattress, trash from a meal in the corner. Anette shone her light around and discovered a corridor that continued, parallel to the track bed. What the hell kind of a labyrinth was this?

  She made a point of memorizing where she had come in and, crouching over, she continued into the darkness. There was a stench of pee and of something sweet and rotten. The dark corners hissed with rats fleeing her footsteps.

  After about fifteen feet she came to a junction, where the corridor crossed both another corridor that ran perpendicular to it and a shaft that led further down. Which way now?

  She perked up her ears, but couldn’t hear anything but the rats and a distant whine from the train rails. If Jeppe were here, he would have some kind of gut sense, put a crystal on his forehead, and let his intuition guide him. Anette considered if there might be something to his theory, that becoming a mother had really made her more sensitive. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Wh
at the fuck are you doing here?”

  Anette jumped. The voice sounded mean, and whoever had spoken was hidden in the shadows.

  “Who’s asking?” She clenched her fists.

  Silence. Then a rustling in the branch of the perpendicular corridor that ran off to the left. Footsteps coming closer slowly, dragging.

  A man came into view.

  Anette forced herself not to scream. She was not an easy scare, but the sight of him was overwhelming. He was bald and muscular, and walked hunched over like herself, his bulging shoulders completely filling the narrow corridor. And he was blue.

  The man’s face and scalp, his neck and hands: all of his visible skin was covered with tight, colorful tattoos, transforming him into some kind of fantasy-novel giant. A bunch of piercings glinted in his forehead, his cheeks, and his nose.

  “You have ten seconds to tell me what you’re doing here!”

  “Say, what, am I standing on your lawn or something?” Anette knew better than to let his appearance intimidate her. “I didn’t know the whole railway system belonged to you.”

  “Are you looking for a place to shoot up?” He sounded a little less gruff.

  “I’m looking for a young girl, who’s missing. Rumor has it she’s living here.”

  The blue giant fell quiet for a moment. Then he turned around and started walking away, his torso almost horizontal under the low ceiling.

  “Come!”

  Anette stood for a moment, uncertain. Then she followed him. The giant walked a long way, turned to the right, and crawled down one level to a room that was about fifteen feet by ten. Down here the ceiling was higher, and they were both able to stand upright. Along one wall lay a mattress with a sleeping bag, and next to that there was a shelf full of books and clothes. Three computer screens—along with accompanying keyboards, drives, and various flashing boxes—glowed on top of a wobbly particleboard desk. Aside from the lack of windows, it was almost pleasant here, in a squatter kind of way.

  The giant turned around to face her, putting his hands together in front of his crotch like a soldier. His eyes shone bright in the dark blue face.