by Sara Blaedel
After a good half hour, as she was starting to develop a headache, she jumped a little when Lars finally spotted something.
‘There she is!’ Lars said, shattering their focused silence.
His finger followed the stream of people on their way down the escalator from the round plaza at Kongens Nytorv.
Louise accidentally knocked over one of their coffees as she spun around to see his screen. She jumped up and grabbed the pictures of Christina.
‘Damn it!’
The archivist came rushing back in to ask if anything was wrong.
‘Do you have something I could wipe this up with?’ Louise asked, trying to stem the little river of mocha-coloured fluid heading for the edge of the table.
It only took him a second to whip out a roll of paper towels. In the meantime, Lars had turned so his back was blocking any view of the screens. He stayed like that until the short man left again.
‘Sorry,’ Louise apologised. ‘Can I see?’
Lars rewound a little. The camera didn’t cover the top of the escalator; but halfway down, a blonde woman with a large bag over her shoulder came into view. She was leaning against the handrail, her head turned back over her shoulder. They could see she was talking to the man on the step behind her, but they couldn’t really see her face. It didn’t make it any easier that as the two stood there, a steady stream of harried commuters hurriedly walked down the escalator steps past them, each one temporarily obstructing the camera’s view of them. Louise immediately estimated the man’s age as mid-thirties. His dark hair fell down, covering his face, as he leaned forward to hear what the woman was saying.
They did not get a good look at the couple until they reached the landing at the bottom and walked around to continue down on the last section of the escalator.
‘That’s them!’ Lars announced emphatically, freezing the frame.
Louise moved in close to hold up the full-body photograph of Christina Lerche so they could compare. The man was standing with his back to the camera.
‘That’s her,’ her partner repeated, advancing the images at half speed.
People started moving again, their movements exaggeratedly slow. Christina stepped forward so the camera caught the right side of her face from an angle.
‘Stop,’ Louise exclaimed. ‘Stop right there.’
She held the photograph with the close-up shot next to the screen.
‘That fucking isn’t Christina Lerche!’ Louise blurted out, shaking her head. ‘That woman’s smile is completely different. I think Christina’s hair was longer, too. That woman’s is only shoulder length.’
‘Maybe she got a haircut,’ Lars suggested, sounding a little irritated.
‘I just saw her yesterday,’ Louise exclaimed. ‘True, her hair was hanging off the edge of the autopsy table, but it must have at least reached her shoulders, probably further.’
Lars grumbled, clearly not convinced.
The dark-haired man was tilting his head down and concentrating on where he put his feet.
‘Let’s look at them on my tape when they get to the platform.’
Louise rolled her chair back over to her own screen, ready to see them appear, but they didn’t show up. She compared her time stamp with the one showing on Lars’s machine. They were almost identical, so the couple should have been there.
‘They’re gone!’
‘Rewind and try again.’
‘I would’ve seen them if they were here,’ she said in a tone that really left no doubt. ‘They must not have taken the train toward Vanløse station after all. Maybe they went the other direction, toward Amager Strand? We can look and see if he shows up again. He should, if he was just there to see her off,’ Louise speculated, trying to tamp down her irritation a bit.
‘I wrote down the tape number and the time stamp, so I can find them again. Let’s just keep looking,’ Lars said, as if he was giving in only grudgingly. ‘If we don’t find anyone else who resembles her, we can have her friend Marianne look at this couple.’
‘Good idea,’ Louise conceded.
Their concentration was shot. Their eyes laboriously followed passengers as they climbed on and off trains. After another fifteen minutes, Louise punched the freeze-frame button on her machine with a hard jab of her thumb.
‘There!’ she cried out.
A couple was standing on the far end of the platform, talking.
‘They must have taken the lift down, not the escalator,’ Louise said, staring at the young blonde woman. Now there was no doubt. It was Christina Lerche, smiling eagerly and nodding at what the man said. She gave him a quick hug before they parted ways, and then she started walking down the platform to get ready to board the train. At the same time, he forced his way into the lift between a stroller and a bicycle to go back up again.
Louise stopped and rewound a little. She and Lars sat together watching in deep concentration, following the man. His dark, collar-length hair was slightly wavy.
‘Six-foot-one,’ Lars guessed.
‘Come on, turn around so we can see you!’ Louise urged, drumming her fingers on the tabletop. The man didn’t seem to realise he was being filmed, she thought, and yet he kept his face pointed away from the station camera the whole time.
Lars rewound the tape and they watched the scene again.
It’ll be hard to make the description any more specific using this, Louise thought. She noted that he was thin. He was too far away to let them see his facial features clearly, but there was something aristocratic-looking about him. He had a bit of a Roman nose, and his lips were full.
Lars was sitting with his face in his hands. It just wasn’t enough to go by; they both knew that. A rear view and a blurry silhouette weren’t enough to print out and take to the press. Louise wound the tape all the way back, and neither of them said anything. There was no reason to leave the results of their search queued up for that little archivist, who would no doubt be in here trying to figure out what Louise and Lars had been looking for the second they left.
The archivist appeared in the doorway and nodded at the monitor, which was off. He asked, ‘Are you looking for that woman the papers wrote about today?’
Louise was about to deny it. Then she pictured him playing the tape back until he found Christina Lerche and comparing her with the old photo one of the newspapers had managed to obtain. Louise had no reason to believe he would do this, but she was annoyed that they hadn’t got more from their search and she felt like blaming someone. So she nodded that he was right, even though she didn’t know how much the newspapers had managed to find out.
‘Awful story,’ he mumbled, following them to the stairs, where he disappeared back into the security office.
‘Why don’t we go to that singles mixer event on Friday?’ Camilla asked as she and Louise were sitting at Café Svejk that evening, waiting for Peter. Louise listened to her friend without taking her eyes off the river of people strolling down Andebakke Path into Frederiksberg Park.
‘If he’s such an enthusiastic online dater, then there’s a chance he’ll turn up when they hold the next singles mixer,’ Camilla explained. ‘It’s a way to meet other people who have profiles on the website.’
‘I don’t really think it’s all that likely that he’ll show up if every newspaper in Denmark is reporting that the police are looking for him.’
They were drinking Czech draught beer and had been lucky that an outside table by the little pond had been free when they arrived. Peter thought it was a great idea to go out for a beer, but then he had called when they were on their way out there and told them he would join them later. Markus was sleeping over at a friend’s house, so Camilla wasn’t in any hurry to get home.
The morning’s disappointment was still weighing on Louise. When they got back to police headquarters, Suhr had trouble accepting they hadn’t got anything useful from the surveillance footage. He’d stopped the press release that they were about to issue and insisted on watching the r
ecordings from the metro station in person. Louise had sat in Heilmann’s office, cursing about Suhr second-guessing their ability. He came to the office late in the afternoon and stood in the doorway, admitting it would be hard to use anything from the CCTV footage from the station to hunt for the suspect, and in the same breath he decided to stop the press release because it didn’t include a useful picture of the suspect.
Before he left, he asked Heilmann to set aside time after Tuesday’s morning briefing so they could discuss how to word the warning. He had decided that they would look for other women who had experienced similar assaults, which was the original plan, but Suhr apparently decided that warning women about meeting face-to-face any dark-haired men who were about thirty and who they had only met online would be casting too broad a net. And, although Louise had been trying to keep her disappointment to herself all day, the setback had taken an even greater toll on Suhr. After volubly bragging to the chief of police in the hallway outside the homicide division’s offices, claiming they were already getting close to solving the case, Suhr had later been forced to explain that they might not have got as far as they’d first thought.
‘We have to get Suhr not to release this,’ Camilla exclaimed when she heard about the warning the police were about to send out.
Louise stared at her blankly.
‘If he waits before he goes public with this warning, then the suspect can attend that mixer thing at no risk,’ Camilla added.
‘The man just committed a rape and a murder. He’s not going to show up at a mixer,’ Louise scoffed, shaking her head.
Camilla took a sip of her beer and then scooted her chair a little further back toward the fence around the pond so the afternoon sun could hit her face.
‘Dating is apparently a subject you have rather limited knowledge of,’ Camilla said in her best schoolmistress’s voice, looking at Louise. ‘It’s got its own culture. There’s a solidarity among daters. You can take part and still be anonymous. People show up at these events with their login name on their shirt, so you go over to TruckerBob and say, “Hi, it’s me, Anemone. We’ve exchanged emails.”’
Although Camilla was speaking as though she were giving a detailed lecture at the university, she could tell Louise still didn’t really get it.
‘You get kind of, I don’t know, addicted to it,’ Camilla continued. ‘And then at these events you have a chance to see all the people whose login names you know from the internet. If you don’t want anyone to recognise you, you show up under a new identity and say you just thought you’d give dating a try.’
‘How many people come to one of these events?’ Louise asked, having no real sense what the number would be.
‘A thousand, maybe two,’ Camilla guessed and then ordered two more beers, but upped it to three as she noticed Peter walking up.
Louise greeted him with a kiss and pulled a chair over from the neighbouring table. She could certainly see Camilla’s point, but it was just too dicey compared to letting the public know there was a brutal rapist on the loose. After all, there was no guarantee he would show up at a social event like that. And even if it did turn out that he was there, it would be hard to spot him in the crowd.
Louise was about to ask Peter if he’d had a good day, when Camilla commandeered his attention, asking what he thought about her plan. Louise smiled at Camilla’s enthusiastic arguments, finished her beer, and took her wallet out to pay for the next round, which the waiter was just setting on the table.
Peter nodded slightly absent-mindedly.
Louise thought that Suhr’s professional vanity might keep him from holding his announcement from the press until Friday.
‘What the hell other alternative is there?’ Camilla wanted to know, gesturing with her hands for emphasis. ‘You don’t have anything. That’s fucking worse. A murder, a rape and a psychopath who hog-ties women and stuffs crap in their mouths! This is really going to be fun for Suhr once the slow news days of summer start. The press is going to go to town with this story. They’re going to rake him over the coals. He’s not going to fucking enjoy that very much.’
Louise grinned. Camilla was right. He wasn’t going to fucking enjoy that at all. Then she grew serious again.
‘First of all, you don’t know what we have – and you won’t know that, either, until you hear it from Suhr; and, second, if I pitch your idea to him, I will do so without any input from you. We don’t team up with journalists when we do things like this. So you can just stop looking forward to that Saturday cover story you’re dreaming about.’
Camilla sat back a bit in her chair, offended, and fumed. ‘I wouldn’t dream of getting mixed up in all this, but I just might invite Henning to the event on Friday, and Suhr better not fucking stop me.’
Peter smiled as Louise sighed. She decided not to present Camilla’s idea to Suhr, but also wouldn’t tell Camilla she wasn’t going to. She really wanted to ask some more questions about Henning, but she held back since Peter was there.
The first of May was as warm as if it had been August, and people were strolling home with picnic baskets and blankets over their arms. It had been a long time since she and Peter had had dinner in the park. Even though it was so close to where they lived, they rarely went. Actually, it had been quite a while since they had done anything so wholesomely ordinary and enjoyable together. A little devil on her shoulder whispered that the spontaneity had vanished … after they’d moved in together. She looked at him and thought maybe it had already happened before they had moved in together. Their everyday lives had taken over. Work kept them busy. Peter had been working a lot of overtime, and he tried hard to keep his weekly badminton date. Most of the week was taken up that way, without much time for them to just be there for each other.
She reached for his hand. Every once in a while she longed for a little more togetherness, but mostly she enjoyed the sense of freedom she felt. She didn’t need them to do every last thing together. What she loved most about their relationship was just knowing they were on the same team, knowing that they loved each other and that he was always there for her. Doing everything together wouldn’t necessarily strengthen those feelings.
‘I presume you’ll let me know what Suhr says about my idea,’ Camilla nagged. ‘Or, obviously, I could call him and ask him myself.’
‘We’ll have to wait and see how far he and Heilmann get tomorrow,’ Louise said evasively. She thought about how Camilla’s suggestions often seemed very simplistic. Camilla went after ideas or stories without thinking about their consequences. They had known each other for many years, and Louise knew it didn’t matter what she said; Camilla always did whatever she wanted anyway. But Louise tried to be a little bit of a grounding influence by bringing up the consequences and realities that went along with the ideas in her friend’s blonde head.
Later, all three of them strolled along Smallegade up to Falkoner Allé. Peter followed a few paces behind them.
‘There’s one major flaw with your idea,’ Louise told Camilla as they parted ways. ‘He has enough time to attack one more victim before Friday if we don’t do something before then. And Suhr won’t be happy about that, either. I’m sure that would get a lot of fucking play during the slow summer news cycle.’
18
‘I really want to talk to you before the morning briefing.’ Heilmann had come over and poked Louise’s shoulder as she stood pouring herself some coffee in the little kitchenette off the break room where her colleagues were showing up for Tuesday morning’s briefing.
Heilmann looked tense and serious, and Louise noticed how she was bracing herself for whatever was coming. Fucking asshole, she thought, picturing the back of the suspect’s head with its dark wavy hair, and then followed Heilmann into her office. Louise took a seat on the edge of the visitor’s chair and noticed she was clenching her jaw. She opened and closed her jaw a few times and massaged just below her temples to get her jaw muscles to relax.
Heilmann was watching her.
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br /> Self-consciously, she slowly lowered her hands into her lap and grew increasingly anxious because the sergeant was not saying anything.
‘Susanne Hansson tried to commit suicide last night,’ Heilmann said.
The silence was oppressive. Louise’s arms felt heavy.
‘She’s been admitted to Hvidovre Hospital. Actually, the police aren’t involved with this at all, but obviously there’s no doubt why she felt driven to do such an unfortunate thing. Her mother was the one who called the ambulance.’
Exactly a week after she found Susanne the last time, Louise thought, her heart sinking. She pictured the slightly awkward, battered expression on Susanne’s face, and it struck more of a chord in her than she would have liked.
There was a knock on Heilmann’s door, and Suhr stuck his head in. ‘You guys coming?’
‘We’ll join you in a minute,’ Heilmann replied, waving him away.
‘Susanne’s mother called Suhr at home at six this morning. She must have got the number out of the phone book,’ Heilmann continued, smiling wanly. ‘I think you should drive out there and talk to Susanne. I’m sensing maybe there’s something she hasn’t told us. Something that’s really bothering her. This was a cry for help, so obviously we’ll also need to offer her some counselling.’
Louise nodded, completely in agreement.
‘Not that you should push her too hard,’ Heilmann continued, ‘but maybe she’s remembered something that could help us. Something she repressed originally because of the shock. We do see that all the time.’
‘Of course I’ll talk to her. I can go right now,’ Louise said.
‘You should attend the morning briefing first. You can drive out to Hvidovre after that,’ Heilmann replied, standing to retrieve the vehicle logbook off the bookshelf behind her. She wrote in Louise’s name and tossed her a set of keys. They walked together over to the break room, where the briefing was already under way. They had just sat down when Willumsen flung the door open and interrupted Suhr.
