by Sara Blaedel
‘I want to have something actionable after lunch,’ Suhr continued, bellowing. ‘There is a lot of attention on rape cases these days, especially when the parties met each other online, and a case like this one might drag out over several weeks if the media latches on to it. We can assume they’ll publish that the victim was gagged and bound. The mother obviously isn’t planning on keeping her mouth shut about the way she found her daughter, but apparently she doesn’t know that her daughter met the perp online. Her version makes it sounds like a complete stranger forced his way into her daughter’s apartment. The story will undoubtedly blow up if it comes out that the victim invited the suspect in.’
Louise knew Suhr was already picturing the headlines.
‘You need to close this case, and I will not tolerate you spending time on other cases before this one is out of the way. If you’ve got anything pressing on your plate, you’ll have to hand it off to someone else.’ Suhr cast a quick glance at Willumsen. ‘And it has to come through me.’
Louise glanced at Heilmann as they stood up, but she couldn’t tell whether she was satisfied with the lieutenant’s direct rebuke of Willumsen.
‘Let’s meet in my office and touch base on this,’ Heilmann said on her way out the door.
‘Was your pal Camilla the one who called the lieutenant?’ Michael Stig asked as they sat around the desk in Heilmann’s office.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t spoken with her,’ Louise answered defensively.
‘Maybe it’d be a good idea for you to call Camilla Lind and find out what the mother is saying and why she went to a newspaper with the story,’ Heilmann said.
Louise was about to suggest that someone else should make that call, but then it occurred to her that she didn’t want to draw any more attention than necessary to her relationship with Camilla.
‘Okay, I’ll give her a call, but I’ve got an appointment with Susanne at ten. She’s coming up here so we can try to nail down a description.’
‘The perp’s online profile isn’t up any more,’ Toft informed them. ‘I went into Susanne’s profile to check her inbox and the messages she had got from Bjergholdt, and as far as I could tell his profile has been deleted.’
‘That was probably one of the first things he did after he wiped off her blood,’ Stig interjected.
‘Shouldn’t we also see if we can find any other women Bjergholdt was in contact with via the dating site?’ Lars suggested.
‘We should track any accounts that exchanged messages with “Mr Noble”,’ Toft said.
Louise raised her eyebrows, wondering if Bjergholdt’s profile name were somehow an allusion to his being from a blue-blooded family. Or whether it meant he thought he was an attractive guy or something.
‘So what was Susanne’s profile name?’ Louise enquired, curious.
‘“Snow Wite”, without the h.’
‘Ah, the spelling with the h was probably already taken,’ she remarked.
‘The website’s administrator can trace any messages exchanged with Mr Noble. If they balk at that, we’ll sic CCU on them.’
This made Louise think of the men from Ghostbusters showing up with the vacuum-like gadgets on their backs, exorcising ghosts. It’s actually kind of the same thing, she thought: we’re looking for something that can’t be seen.
‘Have you told the photo lab you’re coming?’ Heilmann asked, looking at Louise.
Louise nodded and asked Heilmann if having Susanne look at the photo archive would jeopardise her ability to pick the perp out of a line-up later on. In cases where the victim had a lot of doubt about the perpetrator’s description, they frequently ran into big problems with defence lawyers claiming that the reliability of the recognition is weakened when they present the victim with a series of pictures in advance. And it happened too often that when the police showed pictures to a victim, it affected the victim’s memory.
‘Do we have any choice?’ Heilmann said, looking at her.
‘No, we really don’t,’ Louise answered, annoyed that witnesses were so bad at recognition. People were so unbelievably bad at remembering details accurately. Dark-haired men become medium-blond. A face that one witness remembers as having pronounced features is remembered by another as having weak features.
‘Or do we go to the press?’ she suggested, interrupting the silence that had settled over the conference table. ‘We could describe the crime and look for other women who had something similar happen to them, and then hope they’ve got a clearer image of the suspect in their minds.’
‘Are we looking for other women?’ Lars asked, looking as if he had been suddenly awakened from his thoughts.
‘Not yet.’
Heilmann had apparently already given this thorough consideration. ‘There is no doubt that when the story hits the papers, there will be a massive chorus of folks saying Susanne herself is to blame for what happened to her. We can agree, can’t we, that there is no reason to subject her to that as long as it can be avoided?’
Everyone nodded. Not just for Susanne’s sake, but also because the uproar would make it hard for them to do their work.
‘We need to get her to give us a description, and we’ll look after the rest ourselves,’ Heilmann said, and then told Louise, ‘But find out what the mother is saying.’
When they stood up, Heilmann asked Stig to drive out and have a word with Susanne’s mother. The way she said it left no doubt that she meant he should drive out there and get her to shut up.
*
Louise asked Susanne to sit in the chair in front of the yellowed screen that the photographs would be projected onto.
In the room next door, the technician was pulling out the photos that matched the information they had given him: male, dark complexion, high forehead, dark eyes, smooth face. Those were the characteristics that had been noted in advance; height was plus or minus four inches, and age was plus or minus five years.
Before they got going with the slides, Louise wanted to show Susanne the sex-offenders file, which contained photos of the people with previous convictions for sexual offences.
‘They’re using it in the room next door, but you can have it after we’ve been through the slides,’ the technician said when Louise asked for the file.
He snapped the slide carousel into place with a loud click and handed Susanne the control with the button that advanced the carousel.
‘Let’s just forget going after a specific person,’ Louise told the technician before they got started. ‘Susanne is too fuzzy on what he looks like. We’re looking for a type.’
The technician nodded.
‘Okay, we’re ready now,’ Louise said. She took a pad of paper out and sat next to Susanne, explaining that she should just advance through the photos at whatever pace she wanted and take plenty of time.
Susanne nodded and pressed the button to pull up the first photo that the technician had found in the comprehensive offenders’ index that the police maintained.
‘He didn’t look at all like that,’ she exclaimed emphatically, sounding irritated.
Louise considered whether she should tell Susanne that in fact he was an exact match for the description Susanne had given them, but Louise knew it was hard to understand how precise a description had to be before you could pick out a person who even vaguely resembled the person you were looking for. It wasn’t that easy to explain the wide range that ‘dark’ and ‘dark hair’ actually covered when someone described it that way, based on an image in their head.
Susanne clicked to the next image.
‘His forehead wasn’t that high, his temples are even higher,’ she said, studying the photograph of a sleepy man with tousled hair. It wasn’t any easier to recognise people when many of them were groggy and dishevelled because they were usually photographed the morning after their arrest.
Louise took down Susanne’s comments on her pad of paper. ‘His eyes are prettier!’ Susanne exclaimed.
‘How so?’
; ‘More honest.’
‘How so?’ Louise repeated.
‘They’re more attentive.’
‘Explain.’
‘They aren’t set as close as his.’ Susanne pointed at the screen.
Eyes not close-set, Louise wrote on her pad.
An hour later, she handed a piece of paper to the technician. Three times Susanne had exclaimed, ‘That’s him!’ And the first time her outburst triggered sobbing, after which she sat for several minutes staring out into space.
Each time, Louise had suggested they take a break. The monotonous clicking when a new picture was called up was grating on their nerves, and sitting in the dark was making them sleepy. However, Susanne had quickly composed herself and said they should continue; but when Louise asked why she thought it was him, it turned out she actually wasn’t sure.
‘He looks like him. The mouth and nose are the same.’
The technician came in and handed them a piece of paper with the names and details on the three people she had picked out. The first man, Karsten Flintholm, had done time for rape, and that made Louise’s adrenaline surge. His picture would undoubtedly also be in the sexual-offenders file. The two other men hadn’t been previously connected to rape.
Flintholm was the only one Susanne had immediately responded to as she sat flipping through the blue binder of sexual offenders, but she looked hard at the pictures that came up each time she turned a page. As though she’s memorising the faces, Louise thought, wondering if Susanne thought maybe she could learn to see the evil in them if she paid enough attention. Louise felt sorry for her and hoped it was some consolation that many of them looked quite average. There were only a couple who you could tell at first glance you probably wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night.
Louise called Lars and asked him to check the three names in the criminal-offender registry so they could see whether they were currently in or out of jail.
In addition to the three specific men, Louise described the general type of face Susanne had pointed out for the suspect. From her comments about a high forehead, eyes not closely set, and the other details that Louise had written down on her pad, the technician pieced together a description in the room next door and handed her a printout.
She took Susanne downstairs. Her face was hidden in the shadow of her baseball cap again, concealing her dark bruises. Initially Susanne said she would be taking sick leave from work for the rest of the week, but the crime-scene investigators had said that they had finished at her apartment that day, so she could move in again if she felt she was ready, and she was now contemplating going back into the office.
‘Maybe you should stay with your mother until you’ve got a little distance from the attack?’ Louise suggested before they parted ways. She considered mentioning that Susanne’s mother had contacted the newspaper, to see if Susanne was aware of that.
‘I’d rather go home.’
‘How is your mother taking all this?’ Louise asked, curious. ‘It must have given her quite a fright.’
‘She called a locksmith so I could get the keys changed, and had a peephole and chain installed on my door. She doesn’t know I was out on a date with him.’ Susanne shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
‘Are you trying to keep that a secret?’ Louise asked.
Susanne carefully touched the wound on her left cheekbone. ‘It’s no secret. We just don’t talk about stuff like that,’ she said after a long pause.
‘You’re not close?’ Louise asked.
‘Yeah, I suppose you could say that. She has created her own image of what my life is, and it’s not that easy for her to see beyond those preconceived notions.’
Louise pulled her over to a bench on the landing. They spoke softly so their voices wouldn’t carry through the stairwell.
‘What does she want your life to be like?’ Louise prodded.
‘The way things usually are. I’ve lived alone for twelve years. I moved to the apartment downstairs when I was twenty, when I got my job at the bank. We’ve got our rhythm, my mother and I, and she really likes things this way. Everything’s become routine.’
‘A routine you don’t dare – or don’t want – to break out of?’
‘There’s no need to change anything until there’s a reason to,’ Susanne replied, evasively.
‘Did you know that your mother got in touch with the press and told them your story?’
Louise still wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to bring this up, but this was the closest thing to a heart-to-heart they’d had so far, where Louise was able to get some insight into the life that Susanne had been living until Monday night when she went out to dinner with the man who called himself Jesper Bjergholdt.
At first Susanne didn’t respond to what Louise said, but then she kicked the toes of her shoes together.
‘I didn’t know that,’ Susanne admitted with a sigh. ‘But she can’t understand why he hasn’t been arrested.’ She glanced at Louise out the corner of her good eye. ‘She’s afraid he’ll come back.’
‘Are you afraid he’ll come back?’ Louise asked.
Susanne shrugged. ‘I don’t think I’m afraid … and yet … I don’t feel anything. I might also run into him on the way to work, or he could be standing there when I get home.’
She took off her cap, set it in her lap and shook her short hair.
‘It didn’t occur to me in the least that that night could have ended in such a disaster, and it may sound strange after all that’s happened, but I can’t really imagine it happening again, either.’
Louise watched her as she spoke. There was naivety and a protective shell around her that evidently had been there for many years, but at the same time she sensed that now there was also an awareness that you can’t always control what life has in store for you.
‘Maybe it’s time you took responsibility for your own life,’ Louise suggested, thinking how sad it was that Susanne had been so deeply hurt the very first time she had made an attempt to do something slightly out of the ordinary.
‘Maybe.’
‘At any rate, you ought to talk to your mother. I don’t think either of you should be talking to any more reporters,’ Louise said, looking for a way to make her next point so it wouldn’t sound as harsh. ‘But now that the story is out, you’re going to have to resign yourself to the possibility that the fact will come out that you knew the suspect in advance and that you had been out together.’
Susanne put her cap back on and nodded. ‘And there’s nothing wrong with that, either,’ she said, to convince herself of that sentiment.
‘Not at all,’ Louise acknowledged.
Back in her office, Louise threw the printout onto Lars’s desk.
‘Something along these lines,’ she said, sitting down.
He read the descriptions while he updated her on what he had found out while she was gone.
‘Karsten Flintholm was released seven months ago,’ Lars began. ‘We’ve got both fingerprints and DNA for him, so it might be easy to match if it turns out anything is still usable from Susanne’s place. The second face she picked out is Nils Walther. He’s been out for over a year, but, as I said, he’s never been involved in a crime of this calibre before. He’s mostly interested in things that can be converted into cash.’
Louise pushed her chair back and propped her legs up on the edge of her desk.
‘The last guy, Søren Matthisen, is still in prison. He has another year to go for rape, so he’s out of the picture.’
‘He wasn’t on weekend release by any chance and failed to return on Monday?’ Louise brainstormed.
Lars smiled, shook his head, and said, ‘I checked.’
‘Okay. I’ll try to get hold of Camilla.’
She was a little afraid to hear what Susanne’s mother had told Camilla and recalled what Susanne had said. Louise recognised the feeling of irritation from the past when her own mother had been a little too controlling, but she knew it couldn’t compare. Her
e they were clearly dealing with a mother who had seized control over her daughter’s life. She lived right upstairs, which in and of itself was enough to make Louise cringe. A mother who was involved in controlling what her daughter did, what relationships she had, and what opinions she held. She probably also knew all the people Susanne hung out with – and there most likely wouldn’t be many of them. It must feel like living in a gigantic straitjacket.
‘Poor Susanne,’ Louise mumbled, noticing that Lars was looking at with her with a questioning expression on his face. She felt sympathy for Susanne and how she had secretly tried to forge a path out of her mother’s domination by carefully trying to create her own happiness and look for a husband and family. In her peculiar living situation, the only refuge that was free from her mother’s ever-watchful eye was the internet. Her seemingly uncharacteristic turn to online dating now made more sense than ever.
8
Camilla answered her phone so fast, Louise suspected she’d been sitting there with her hand hovering over the receiver.
‘What did Susanne Hansson’s mother say when she called you?’ Louise began, without even saying hello.
‘Susanne Hansson?’ Camilla’s attempt to feign ignorance did not succeed.
‘Knock off the subterfuge,’ Louise insisted. ‘I really want to know what her mother told you. I don’t get why she even contacted you. What did she want?’
The length of time it took Camilla to respond told Louise that her friend was considering whether or not she could get something in exchange for her information.
‘She didn’t understand why the paper hadn’t reported the assault,’ Camilla finally said. ‘She feels like all you ever read about is rapes, but then no one was interested in such a crime against her own daughter.’
‘She really ought to be grateful for that,’ Louise huffed.
‘Well, she wasn’t!’ Camilla said, sounding jovial but then quickly becoming serious. ‘It sounds like an awful story. I haven’t been able to get Lieutenant Suhr to confirm the chain of events, which I’m assuming means I’m pretty close … or maybe the actual details are even worse, and that’s why he’s being so tight-lipped about it.’
