by Sara Blaedel
Susanne nodded. ‘I guess that seems more like it.’
But you have no idea, Louise thought, sighing to herself and leaning back in her chair. It was almost one in the morning, and they weren’t really getting anywhere. The description was too vague to be of any use, so they might as well stop.
‘I suggest that we make an appointment for tomorrow after you’ve had a chance to rest. Then we can look at some pictures together. Maybe it will be easier for you to describe his features if we have something to compare to,’ she said.
Susanne yawned and nodded.
‘Can you go home to your mother’s place at this time of night?’
‘She lives upstairs from me in the same building, and I’m sure she’s sitting up waiting, so I could. But I’d rather go back to my place,’ Susanne said after a second, ‘if that’s all right.’
‘I think your apartment is still sealed off, and it would be best if you weren’t alone.’
It didn’t look like Susanne agreed, but after a bit she nodded anyway.
‘Let’s say two o’clock tomorrow afternoon back here. I’ll just arrange for someone to give you a ride home.’
Louise called up the operations desk and asked if there was someone who could drive Susanne Hansson back to her mother’s place. Then she drummed her fingers as she waited for a response.
‘Great,’ she said into the phone, once it was all arranged. Then she stood up. ‘I’ll walk you down to the main entrance, and a car will pull around to pick you up.’
They walked down the corridor together. Louise was surprised to see that Lars was still sitting in the office next door. After she saw Susanne off, she went back to find out if he had come up with anything, since he was still around.
‘I just checked the Criminal Register,’ he said, ‘but we don’t have anyone by that name. That would almost have been too easy.’
He stood up and offered her a lift home.
‘Yeah, thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it would do me good to ride my bike, but it’ll be fine parked here until tomorrow.’
She tiptoed in so she wouldn’t wake Peter. He’d left a note on the kitchen table with a big arrow pointing to the refrigerator and the words ‘midnight snack’ written in red felt-tip pen. She smiled and opened up the fridge. She found Danish sausage, sliced ham and different types of cheese neatly arranged on a plate. She cut herself a slice of bread, took a beer out onto the back steps, and sat down with the day’s newspaper, which by this point was almost twenty-four hours old. She hadn’t felt hungry earlier and didn’t really now either, but she needed to sit and unwind for a bit. As she finished eating, she suddenly felt tired. She yawned, folded up the paper and went to brush her teeth.
5
‘Is there no limit to women’s naivety?’
Michael Stig had sat down on the corner of Louise’s desk. She considered for a moment asking him to get his butt off her desk, but instead she forced a smile and asked what he meant.
They had accessed Susanne’s email that morning, looked through her Outlook Express inbox, and seen that Jesper Bjergholdt had written to her from an account he had set up on Yahoo. They also determined that the two had not exchanged photos. That would help explain some of Susanne’s vagueness when it came to how he looked.
Louise stifled a snort, but it irritated her that they had got their hopes up in the first place, because obviously Susanne would have mentioned it if she’d had a picture of him.
Now she leaned back in her chair, preparing for one of her colleague’s sexist tirades by tuning him out if possible.
‘It’s pretty fucking hard to imagine the man who would send an email from his personal account in a situation like this,’ he began, waiting to see if she were with him before continuing. ‘They set up a Yahoo or Hotmail account so they don’t have to divulge their identity. But it’s so typical – women just hand out their email addresses without a thought – let alone their phone numbers and street addresses,’ he added, rolling his eyes. ‘It fucking amazes me it doesn’t end in disaster more often.’
He hopped down off the desk and stepped behind Louise’s chair to study her bulletin board, where she had pinned up some personal photos of her and Peter in Scotland and one of Camilla leading her seven-year-old son Markus on an Icelandic horse.
‘If you don’t have anything else, I’m actually kind of busy …’ Louise hinted.
Before Stig could comment on the various photos, she got up and moved so close to him that he stepped back instinctively.
At that moment, her phone rang. She nodded toward the door to get him to leave.
‘Unit A, Louise Rick speaking.’
‘This is the front desk. You’ve got a visitor.’
‘I’m not expecting anyone, and I’m just on my way out the door.’
She had an appointment with Lars to drive out to Susanne’s apartment so they could walk through it together.
‘It’s a Susanne Hansson. She says she was here last night and …’ the guard lowered his voice, ‘she doesn’t look like she’s doing that well.’
Louise sat down and scooted her chair in to her desk. It was eleven-thirty, so her appointment with Susanne wasn’t for another two and a half hours. She felt a sense of alarm mixed with reluctance. Her gaze swept all the case folders piling up on her desk and she found herself hoping that there wouldn’t be too many problems with this one. Susanne’s report was straightforward: aggravated sexual assault in the first degree, though no real way so far to identify the assailant.
‘Send her up,’ she said into her phone. Then she popped over to the break room to find Lars and tell him he could take his time finishing his lunch.
Susanne was wearing a baseball cap which in no way matched the outfit she had picked, but it did conceal a little of her battered face. She sat down in Lars’s chair across from Louise.
‘It’s not right,’ Susanne said. She didn’t waste any time on pleasantries, didn’t even say hi.
Louise’s head sank; an ominous thought started throbbing in the back of her mind. She was sure Susanne had changed her mind and decided not to report the rape after all, and how the hell could Louise stop her?
She took a deep breath and nodded at Susanne. ‘What is not right?’ she asked in her most even-keeled, gentle voice.
‘I can’t put the blame on him,’ Susanne said, her voice filled with regret and justification.
Louise contemplated her for a moment and asked, ‘Have you spoken with the psychologist you were referred to at National Hospital yesterday?’
Susanne shook her head. ‘Don’t need to. I may well need some help at some point, but not right now.’
Louise rolled her chair over, next to Susanne’s. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I went along with it,’ Susanne admitted. ‘I can’t back out now, because I let it go too far.’ Her voice was quiet but determined.
Louise took a firm hold of Susanne’s arm and pulled her toward her. Tears welled up in Susanne’s eyes in response to the physical contact.
‘Are you into S&M?’ Louise demanded. ‘Did you tell him it turns you on to be bound, beaten and raped?’
Susanne yanked her arm back. Her response was so forceful that she pulled Louise, and her chair, towards her own chair. ‘Why are you saying that? Why are you accusing me of being into that kind of thing?’ Susanne exclaimed, starting to cry.
When the door opened and Lars walked in, Susanne turned her back to them and rolled her chair all the way into the corner.
Lars stood in the doorway, trying to figure out what was going on. ‘Should I go?’ he gestured to Louise, who shrugged.
He closed the door and sat down on the low bookshelf.
Louise turned her attention back to Susanne and proceeded. ‘I’m not saying this to upset you. But since you just came in here and told me that you yourself are responsible for what happened, there are a few things we’re going to have to get out in the open.’
Not a sound from the corner.
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Louise rolled her chair all the way over to Susanne. She would succeed either in getting Susanne to relax or in making her feel so cornered that she would decide to flee from the office. She cautiously laid her hand on Susanne’s shoulder and calmly said, ‘You didn’t ask for anything. You didn’t invite him to mutilate and humiliate you, and you definitely shouldn’t blame yourself.’
She gently stroked Susanne’s back and sat there quietly, waiting for her to stop crying.
‘I should have realised that something was wrong,’ Susanne eventually said. ‘And in a way, you are asking for it when you bring a man home with you without getting to know him properly first.’
‘Who the hell has been telling you crap like that?’ Louise interrupted, so angrily it made Susanne jump and sit up in her chair, frightened.
‘It’s obvious,’ Susanne responded meekly.
Louise spun Susanne’s chair around so they were facing each other, and Susanne did not protest.
‘Susanne, is this something that your mother put in your head when you went home last night or something? Where is this outrageous blaming-yourself stuff coming from?’
No response.
Louise turned to Lars, who was sitting perfectly still, trying to attract as little attention to himself as possible.
‘Would you mind calling Jakobsen and telling him he needs to find time to talk with Susanne within the next hour?’
Lars frowned pessimistically. It was fairly short notice to give the crisis psychologist, but Lars headed out the door anyway, and when he came back a few minutes later, he nodded.
Technically, Louise was supposed to ask Susanne if she felt like talking to Jakobsen, but it would be beyond all reason to give her any choice in the matter right now.
‘We’re going to drive you over to National Hospital. They have a good psychologist you should talk to. There is absolutely no reason for you to be so hard on yourself, let alone blame yourself for what happened. While you’re with him, we,’ she continued, pointing at Lars and back at herself, ‘will drive over and take a look at your apartment. It’ll be easier for us to get a sense of what happened once we’ve seen where it took place. Is that okay with you?’
Susanne nodded and found her keys in the pocket of her jacket.
In the car, Louise asked where she and Jesper Bjergholdt had had dinner on Monday night.
‘We were supposed to meet at seven o’clock in Tivoli Gardens, but I don’t know what the restaurant was called. It was right next to Plaenen, the open-air stage there.’
Louise was going to suggest that they take a drive over there after they had looked at some pictures to try to come up with a better description of the perpetrator, but stopped herself. The priority now was for Susanne to talk to Jakobsen.
Lars, who had come with them in the same car, waited while Louise escorted Susanne up to the psychologist’s office, and when she came back down they drove out to the Valby neighbourhood in southwest Copenhagen, to Lyshøj Allé. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been fingerprints either on the bottle of red wine or on the two glasses that were still on the coffee table when the police had arrived at the apartment.
‘He was exceedingly aware of what he was doing,’ Louise said as they walked up the stairs to the second floor.
‘I’m curious to see how long it will take for them to get the results back on the hairs they found on the bed.’ Lars ran his hands through his own short hair as Louise unlocked the door to the apartment.
‘It might take a couple of weeks. Anyway, it’ll take that long for the semen samples Flemming thought he found on her back,’ she said, looking around the front hall with curiosity as she shut the door behind them.
The crime-scene investigators weren’t there right now, but were still keeping the apartment sealed. It would be another day or two before they were done. There was some technical equipment lying around, but otherwise the crime had left behind only a feeling of emptiness.
‘He knew what he was going to do to her all along,’ Lars said. ‘From the moment he packed his rape case.’
That was the name Flemming Larsen had immediately given to the small black briefcase Susanne said she had seen Jesper Bjergholdt pulling gags and duct tape out of.
‘He had it under his arm when they met at Tivoli,’ Louise added. ‘Hard to imagine anything more cynical or calculating than that.’
They were standing in the living room of the one-bedroom apartment. Louise went over and opened the door to the small balcony. She stepped out, looking over the bustling transit hub on Toftegård Square.
‘He had Susanne undress herself,’ Lars continued from the living room. He started getting into his re-enactment, moving around the apartment as he described what had taken place. ‘He opened the wine, brought it in here and set it on the table, but he got rid of his fingerprints. And Susanne was the one who poured it into the glasses. He was sickeningly aware of where he put his hands.’
Louise took a seat on the couch. There was a bookshelf that took up one whole wall. In the middle of it was an empty desktop where Susanne evidently usually kept her computer.
‘Do you need to see anything else?’ Lars asked from out in the hallway. Since the crime-scene investigators were still working on securing the evidence, they had to make do with just a quick glance into the bedroom.
Louise stood up. The apartment was quite girly, exactly as she had expected, without even the slightest masculine touch anywhere. The kitchen had a bunch of white porcelain canisters with floral designs on the labels and the words ‘flour’, ‘sugar’, and the like printed in a swooping typeface.
She stood, looking around. There was something modest about the way Susanne had furnished the place. Nothing in the apartment came across as ostentatious in any way.
She turned and walked back out into the front hall. ‘Nah. Let’s just go,’ she said.
‘Should I swing by Tivoli after we pick up Susanne?’ Lars asked once they were seated in the car. ‘While the two of you go look at some photos?’
Louise thought about it. ‘I think we should bring her to Tivoli with us, if Jakobsen doesn’t have any objections. There’s a chance that some part of what she’s repressing will make its way to the surface when she finds herself back in the place where they had a good time together.’
But when Louise checked in with Jakobsen’s secretary to pick up Susanne, Jakobsen came out to let her know that it was probably going to take another hour or two before he was ready to let her go. He looked serious.
‘Detective Rick,’ he said, ‘the guy who raped her was kind enough to make it clear that he was just giving her what she had asked for.’
Louise sighed. Oh God, poor Susanne, it’s so unfair. Previous experience told her that repressed memories could have two outcomes, and in some cases one of these was quite striking: the victim would simply push the traumatic event out of her mind. But it could also have the opposite effect, as in this case, where she had obviously repressed the details of what was going on when she said he was ‘just’ giving her what she had asked for. As far as Louise understood the psychologist’s explanation, Susanne had somehow got it into her head that she had actually asked to be raped.
‘This is obviously very harmful to her mental state,’ Jakobsen continued, ‘and I have to smash that notion before I’ll allow her to leave.’
Louise could only nod and accept that there was nothing she could do about it. Jakobsen always got his way. It was obviously also more important for Susanne to be able to continue living with herself than for them to get a good description of the suspect right this very moment. More important from a human perspective! Louise thought, repressing her inner cop.
‘Tell her to call me when she gets home, and we’ll make a new appointment.’
6
They parked on Otto Mønstedsgade, entered police headquarters through the side door next to the municipal courtroom where they hold preliminary hearings, and continued on up to the second floor to Unit A.
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‘So we’re essentially in a holding pattern,’ Lars said, flopping down into his chair. ‘It’s irritating that there isn’t a crowd of witnesses to help us identify this perp. On the other hand it’s fucking weird not to have to go through a ton of witness statements.’
‘So why don’t you go down to Tivoli and ask if anyone saw anything?’ Louise suggested absent-mindedly, as she checked to see if there had been any messages while they were out. ‘Although I don’t know what picture you would take to show people.’ She glanced over at him. ‘We only have pictures of Susanne in her battered state. There’s not a soul alive who could recognise her face that way. And in terms of the perp, it’s not like we have much of a description to go by. I would assume there were quite a few dark-haired men among the couples dining there Monday night if you were to ask at the various restaurants. So if going down there would make you feel more productive, give it a try. But first, drive back to her apartment and find a picture that actually looks like her.’
Just then there was a knock on the door, and Heilmann walked in.
‘We traced his emails,’ she announced.
Sergeant Henny Heilmann was fifty-seven and had been the head of Group 2 for the four years Louise had been working in the homicide division. When Heilmann’s husband had fallen seriously ill last year, she had taken some time off to stay home and take care of him towards the end. It was less than a week before he died, but it took three months before she came back to work. Since then, she’d told Louise that she’d spent the first month slowly trying to adjust to the idea that she was alone. And that twenty-six years of marriage were over. After that, she’d spent some time visiting her sister in France, and for the last several weeks before she returned to work she’d done a few different things – including a fourteen-day yoga-and-meditation retreat in Vrå. When she returned to work, she got in the habit of starting her day with a jog past the Little Mermaid Statue along the Langelinie Promenade, losing about fifteen pounds. Her body, which had been in good shape before, was now fit and muscular in her short-sleeved T-shirt and short skirt, which stopped just above her knee.
