Esther left the room with a faint Enjoy your meal and a growing uneasiness in her gut.
* * *
ISAK HAD NOT returned to Ward U8 at Bispebjerg Hospital. His room was still empty, aside from the forensic specialist who was kneeling by the window with powder and brushes.
An anxious mood pervaded the whole ward, as if one patient’s escape stirred up the pot of fear and possibilities and frightened all the other patients. Scared of the possibilities, scared to miss them.
Jeppe put a brake on his fanciful thoughts. He had probably just seen too many movies. In reality, most of the anxiety was primarily coming from the pale charge nurse in front of him. She stood in the doorway of the unoccupied room with her lips pursed, looking like someone who hadn’t slept. Jeppe knew all too well how that felt.
“So you really still don’t have any idea where he could be?” The charge nurse sounded resigned. “Is there really no one who’s seen him or been in touch with him?”
“Not yet, unfortunately,” Jeppe answered.
Falck cleared his throat and asked, “Could we go somewhere where we could talk in private? Possibly the staff room where we sat last time?”
The charge nurse nodded absentmindedly.
“I guess Simon is the one you really want to talk to,” she said. “I’ll get him.”
She walked them down the hallway to the staff room, switched on the light, and disappeared. Two minutes later the door opened and Simon Hartvig stepped in. If the charge nurse looked tired, the social worker looked more dead than alive. The skin on his face had an unhealthy-looking sheen to it, as if he had been in a sweaty panic more than once during the night.
“Would you like some coffee?” he asked, having neither greeted nor looked at them.
“Yes, please.”
The electric kettle gurgled away and they sat down on the room’s cool vinyl chairs. Falck discreetly loosened the button at the top of his pants. Jeppe pretended he didn’t notice.
“Were you on duty when Isak disappeared yesterday?”
“No, he was already gone by the time I came in.” The electric kettle finished, making a clicking sound, and the social worker rose. “But I was the one who discovered that he was missing.”
“The windows are usually locked. Do you know how he managed to get out?”
“With a key.” Simon took out three mugs and slammed the cupboard closed. He looked tense. “My key, I’m afraid. I don’t understand how he got it. I thought it was in my pocket. I was carrying it around all day yesterday, but it turned out to be the key to my bike lock.”
“So Isak stole your key yesterday, and you discovered it when?”
“Not until I came in for my shift last night and we realized that he had run away. I’m really not careless, this kind of thing never happens to me. The key is always in my pants pocket. I just don’t understand.”
Jeppe eyed the social worker. He looked like someone who had already had to defend himself quite a bit. Surely the administrators didn’t look favorably on an employee who played fast and loose with safety.
“Now that you’ve had some time to think: Is there an obvious place for him to go? Anyone who might help him that you know of?”
“Not his parents, that’s for sure. I’ve spoken to them—I’m sure you guys have, too—and they haven’t seen or heard from him.”
“Who else is he close to?”
“Not really anyone.” The social worker flung up his arms.
“Other social workers or nurses here on the ward?”
Simon shook his head. “Isak is a real introvert, and he doesn’t warm up to people very easily. He has never been good at relationships.”
Simon poured instant coffee into three mugs, filled them with boiling water, and placed the mugs on the table along with a liter of organic milk.
“Thanks. What about the other patients from Butterfly House? Was Isak still in touch with any of them? Marie Birch, for example?”
Simon sat down, a pensive wrinkle in his forehead.
“Marie did actually come by to visit Isak at lunchtime yesterday.” He stirred his coffee and then tapped the drips off the spoon on the edge of his mug. “He seemed happy to see her.”
“Do you know what they talked about?”
“I only said hello to her briefly,” Simon said, shaking his head. “My shift was over, and I went home right after she came.” He drank, set his cup down, then drank again, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. “She looked like a homeless person, you know, dreadlocks and dirty clothes.”
Jeppe studied Simon. Apparently he didn’t know any more about Marie than they did. On the other hand, he seemed burdened by more than worry about Isak’s well-being—a guilty conscience, maybe?
“I get that you don’t know how Isak got ahold of your key, but how was he able to jump out of the window in the first place without being seen? I thought he was supervised around the clock.…”
“The ward is monitored twenty-four hours a day,” Simon said, blushing, “but not the individual patients. We just don’t have the staffing for that.”
“Why do you suppose he ran away?”
Simon shrugged feebly. Redness was spreading from his face to blotches on the side of his neck. Silence filled the room, only a ticking wall clock calling attention to the passage of time.
“Well,” Jeppe said, getting up, “obviously we’ll be in touch if anyone sees or hears from Isak.”
“I’ll see you out.” Simon hastily got to his feet.
They walked through the orange common room, where a group of wide-eyed teenagers followed their movements, and into the bright white administrators’ hallway that led to the door.
“The secretary at the front desk will let you out.” Simon Hartvig nodded goodbye and disappeared back down the hallway.
At the front door, Jeppe checked his phone and saw that his mother had called three times and Thomas Larsen once. Jeppe called Larsen. He picked up after one ring.
“Hi, Kørner. I have the names of those last employees from Butterfly House, the nurses and the cook.”
“How did you find them?” Jeppe gestured to Falck that he would finish his conversation before going out into the rain.
“I went up to Rita Wilkins’s house in Brede and searched through the boxes in her attic. Pretty straightforward actually.”
Straightforward, of course. Larsen is the hero of the day!
“Okay, great. Just give me the names.”
“One of the part-time nurses is named Andrea Jørgensen. We’ve located her. She’s employed at Holbæk Hospital now. But at the moment she’s walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. She’s been out of the country since September.” Jeppe heard Larsen rustling some paper. “The other one’s name is Trine Bremen. She works at National Hospital, presumably in the cardiology department.”
Jeppe repeated the name and workplace to Falck, who took out his phone.
“I’ll call from the car,” Falck said.
Jeppe gave a thumbs-up and returned to his conversation.
“Okay,” he said. “And the cook?”
“His name is Alex Jacobsen. Unfortunately we haven’t tracked him down yet.” Larsen sounded miffed. “But Saidani is still looking.”
“We’ll find him.”
Jeppe was about to wrap up the call when Larsen stopped him.
“I found something else.… The accounting records from Butterfly House were in the attic, too. I haven’t had a chance to go through them in detail yet, but to say the very least, they look inadequate.”
“In what sense?” Jeppe looked out at the rain, which was fusing sky and parking lot into a sheet of grayness.
“I don’t know. Either their economy was a mess, or someone was downright scamming. Hard to say at this point, but I can tell that Rita’s ex-husband is listed as the official owner of the property in many of the documents.”
“Okay, good, look into it and let me know what you find.”
Jeppe hung up and j
ogged across the parking lot to the car, where Falck was already wedged in behind the wheel.
“I found her.” Falck started the car and put it in gear. “Trine Bremen does work in the cardiology department at National Hospital. She’s not answering her phone, but we could go there and see if she’s at work.”
“Excellent, let’s do it!”
Falck steered them calmly through Outer Nørrebro, the windshield wipers going full speed.
“I would go bananas,” Falck exclaimed as they reached Åboulevard.
“Bananas?” Jeppe looked at him in surprise. “Why?”
“I’d go bananas if I worked in a place like that. Loony tunes.”
“Loony tunes?” The childish expression made Jeppe laugh out loud. “It’s an ultramodern, state-of-the-art hospital with every conceivable intervention available, all the bells and whistles.”
“Yeah, but I mean having to deal with people who live in a different world all the time. After a while, you wouldn’t know up from down yourself.”
Jeppe mulled over that unexpected input. Falck might just have a point.
CHAPTER 18
Trine Bremen stuck her fork into the aluminum foil food tray. She was standing in the walkway behind the staff room, where she could hear her colleagues gossiping over lunch. The chicken was dry, but she didn’t have it in her to walk all the way to the cafeteria for something better right now, even if she knew Jette would love to report her to the charge nurse for eating a patient meal. Klaus had picked a fight again early this morning, right in front of the kids, who had sat there staring down into their cornflakes. He was fed up with everything having to accommodate her ups and downs, fed up with her disease taking up all the space in their lives. Disease.
He had said the word with scorn, as if he didn’t believe her, as if she could just choose not to be like this.
“You know, she might be out here…?” Jette opened the staff room door, stuck her red pageboy into the hallway, and tried to sound surprised. “Well, look who’s hiding! There you are. The police are here, they want to talk to you.”
Trine’s heart started to flutter. She dumped the rest of the food into the trash and dashed past her coworker into the staff room, where four nurses, two doctors, and an orderly sat quietly staring back and forth between her and the policemen, as if they were watching a match at Wimbledon.
“Trine Bremen?” the younger, slim detective asked. “We need to ask you a few questions relating to a case we’re investigating. Is there somewhere we could talk?”
“Come, we’ll go to the patient room at the end of the hallway. There we can have some peace and quiet,” she said, sending the detectives a loaded look.
Even if it couldn’t be heard, she could sense the chins starting to wag the second the staff room door closed behind them. A visit by the police was not exactly auspicious when your coworkers already suspect you of every little thing. Trine felt a bubble of defiance well up inside her. Walking down the hallway flanked by two policemen was like standing at the edge of the high dive: terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.
They sat down in the windowless patient room, where the only sign of life, apart from the table and chairs, was a dusty plastic toy pirate ship.
“How can I help you?” Trine asked, feeling fairly on top of things again, strong and professional. Her despair over lunch already seemed far away.
“I’m Jeppe Kørner, and this is my colleague, Detective Falck. We’re here in connection with the murders of Bettina Holte, Nicola Ambrosio, and Rita Wilkins.” It was still the younger detective who did the talking. Falck, who was quite a bit older, looked like he could have used a midday nap. “Am I correct in understanding that you worked at Butterfly House until it closed two years ago?”
Trine noted that he was attractive in a pale, poetic kind of way. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and nodded gloomily.
“It’s hard to believe,” she said. “Have you caught the people who did it?”
“The killer is unfortunately still at large. May I ask where you were the last several nights, particularly Sunday through Wednesday?”
His eyes were grayish blue with a serious look under dark eyebrows. Trine sucked in her cheeks a little.
“At home,” she said. “With my husband and kids. I’ve been working the day shift all week.”
“Could you write down your husband’s phone number so we can contact him?” Falck passed a notepad across the table, and she meticulously wrote Klaus’s name and number in all caps.
“How was Butterfly House as a place to work?” the young, attractive one asked.
“It was okay, I guess. Pretty small, and maybe not the world’s best work environment. The owners were quite stingy. I only worked there for a little while.”
“Are you still in touch with any of your former colleagues?”
She cocked her head to the side. “No, not since Butterfly House closed. I liked Nicola; he was nice. The women could be a little uptight, especially to someone like me.”
“What about the residents?” the detective asked, giving her a penetrating look. “How did you get along with them?”
“They were sweet. Very different, very young.” Her mind was racing. What if she said something wrong? “I hadn’t had much experience with psych patients before I got to Butterfly House, so it was a bit of a shock to me how hard it can be.… It wasn’t for me.”
That last sentence hung, vibrating in the air between them. The pause gave her time to start worrying that she had already said too much when the detective spoke again. His eyes shone with interest. It was nice.
“So you haven’t been in touch with any of the employees or patients from Butterfly House?”
Trine twisted a strand of her hair between her fingers, hesitating.
“I do see Peter Demant from time to time. He’s the one who got me the job back then, and we still speak occasionally.”
The detective smiled at her as if she had finally given him what he was looking for.
“When did you last see him?”
Trine’s pulse accelerated steeply, roaring uncomfortably in her ears. How much should she tell them?
“Yesterday, last night, at his place.”
Both policemen sat unmoving, watching her calmly. Even so, she sensed a change in the energy of the room, a tension.
“Confidentially, Peter is my psychiatrist. I stopped by his place yesterday to renew my prescription.”
“At what time?”
“Late.”
“We had a patrol car parked in front of Peter Demant’s place last night.…”
Trine’s throat was dry, and she had to clear it before she could speak.
“Really, I didn’t see it?”
“Is it normal to pick up prescriptions late at night from your psychiatrist’s private home?”
Her violently beating pulse was making Trine’s head spin. A nervous dizziness crept up on her. She felt an impulse to knock over the table onto the two men and hit them hard with one of the heavy chairs until they shut up. The urge was familiar—it sometimes surfaced when she was feeling cornered.
“I don’t know what’s normal and abnormal in your world, but Peter and I know each other well. He’s sweet enough to be flexible in those periods when I’m working during clinic hours.”
“Then maybe you can tell us where he is now? I had an appointment with him this morning, but he didn’t show up. He’s not answering his phone and is nowhere to be found.”
Trine put her hands in her lap and pinched her own palm, hard. The pain forced her mind off the situation so she could stand being in it.
“Unfortunately I have no idea. I was only with him for ten or fifteen minutes yesterday, just got my prescription and left again.”
“When did you get home?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t in a hurry and strolled home. Maybe around eleven.”
“Can your husband confirm that?”
“Of course! Look, I’m going
to have to get back to my patients, so if there’s nothing else…?”
She got up. The two detectives also stood. They looked like Laurel and Hardy, standing there side by side. The younger one still had that curious look in his eyes, which gave Trine the jitters.
“Make sure you keep your phone on, so we can contact you. We’ll place two officers in front of the ward, and they will escort you home when you get off and keep guard tonight. Three of your former colleagues have already been killed.”
Trine let them exit the patient room first and gave them a brave smile goodbye.
“Then let’s hope no more die.”
* * *
THERE WAS FUSSING from the back seat the whole way into the city. Anette kept her eyes as much on the rearview mirror as she did on the road while singing soothingly as best she could. Judging from her daughter’s response, it wasn’t particularly good.
By the time they reached Nørrevold, Anette was drenched in sweat and her daughter screamed inconsolably. She parked the car by a yellow curb and ran to the back so she could grab the baby from her car seat and hold her. After only a few seconds in her mother’s arms, she stopped crying. Anette, on the other hand, started.
Big, salty tears dripped down onto her daughter’s downy head. It’s just fussing, her mother would have said. Just tired and fussy, that’s all.
Anette hauled the stroller out of the trunk one-handed and unfolded it with some difficulty. Then she carefully settled her daughter amid soft blankets, stuffed animals, and colorful gizmos and started pushing the stroller toward Ørstedsparken. The baby lay, calmly looking up at the trees, as if the world were a peaceful place and she had never felt upset about anything in her little life. When she was like this, she was easy to love.
Tanja Kruse waited for Anette with her own baby carriage on the picturesque bridge over the lake. The former nurse from Butterfly House had agreed to meet but had asked if they could combine it with her daily stroller walk. And though it was unusual to combine detective work with baby care, it suited Anette’s own situation quite nicely.
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