by Sara Blaedel
28
She clutched her neck, where the blood started pouring out as he removed the bread knife from the cut he’d just made. It felt messy, the way it trickled down inside her blouse, between her breasts, and she didn’t dare look.
The scent of freshly baked bread emanated from the kitchen. The coffee table was set with cups and lit candles.
He breathed out, a vein on the side of his neck throbbing. She glanced over at him without moving.
Her blouse was sticking. She bent her head down so her chin was resting on her chest, to stanch the bleeding. The pain seared her neck, and she thought maybe this was pushing more blood out instead, so she raised her head so she was looking straight ahead again. She wasn’t crying.
Moving slowly, he set the bread knife down on the coffee table.
She hadn’t recognised the silhouette of his body through the frosted glass in the door when he rang the bell. She had not been prepared at all and didn’t have a chance to react before he was inside.
With his arms in front of him in a defensive gesture, he had walked slowly toward her, assuring her that he didn’t want to hurt her, just talk.
She had backed up, step by step, as he moved closer.
‘You have to listen to me,’ he pleaded, when they were standing in the kitchen.
Oddly enough, she wasn’t afraid. With her back to the refrigerator, she listened as he explained that he hadn’t killed anyone. That the whole thing was a misunderstanding. There was something earnest and honest about his voice that made her believe what he said.
Her eyes moved down over his face as he spoke.
Suddenly she remembered those eyes. She wanted to move in closer. Woodland lakes, she thought. They were dark with a shimmer of green.
It had changed the second the phone rang. She recognised the dangerous glint in his eye, and saw the distorted expression on his face.
He ordered her to sit still and not pick it up. In a few quick leaps, he was out in the kitchen; when he came back, the serrations in the stainless steel blade had sliced into the thin skin on her neck as he held her firmly in his tight grip and pressed.
‘Answer it,’ he snarled.
She reacted mechanically, speaking in a voice she was not in control of, and was surprised at how calm it sounded.
Now she stared desperately at the bread knife lying on the coffee table. The wound burned, and her body was paralyzed. The fear that had subsided when he started talking to her in his calm voice was back, wrapping itself around her like a mantle of ice.
She felt the blood spreading into a stain on her chest.
In an almost invisible motion, he gestured for her to stand up. He took the bread knife from the coffee table and was right behind her, leading her toward the closed door to the bedroom.
29
‘I don’t think he knows the address,’ Louise explained, standing next to the duty officer’s desk in the middle of the large command centre on the top floor of police headquarters, holding out her hands in an apologetic gesture. ‘But I suddenly had this suspicion that a reporter from Morgenavisen – who Susanne’s been in touch with – might have let the address slip without thinking about it.’
The duty officer smiled at her and said, ‘You really don’t need to apologise. I would have been more than happy to dispatch Nymand and every other available uniform out to Roskilde.’
Telephones were ringing and dispatchers were directing patrols and emergency responses to various addresses throughout the Copenhagen metropolitan area. She overheard a request for a CSI team at a fire in the city centre, and it struck her how you stepped into another world when you came up here. The hectic life, the sound of the countless telephones and police scanners – they just didn’t have that down in her division. There was a quieter, almost pious atmosphere down there, where people moved around in the dark, curving hallways, where footsteps echoed, and everything seemed old-fashioned. Ops was the place at police headquarters that reminded Louise most of the other Copenhagen stations she had worked at before she got promoted to homicide.
‘I haven’t heard from her, so there’s no reason to be worried,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she’s still sitting there chatting with her mother.’
Louise stiffened and asked him to repeat, word for word, what Susanne had said.
‘She said that everything was fine. And that she was just sitting there chatting with her mother.’
Louise was already backing toward the door as he finished speaking.
‘We’re going to Roskilde,’ Louise yelled to Lars, who was still at his desk with the phone to his ear. She quickly grabbed the keys to a patrol car from Heilmann’s office and signed one out in the logbook. She concluded that Heilmann must have gone home already. Her computer was off, at any rate.
Lars was right behind her as she bounded down the stairs, but he still hadn’t asked what had happened.
‘I was supposed to meet Bjergholdt in Tivoli, but he didn’t show. Camilla’s boyfriend Henning came instead.’
She gave him a quick summary, which was enough to justify to her partner that she was ordering him to head out to Roskilde half an hour before his children’s day-care closed.
‘Couldn’t we just call Susanne and see if she’s okay?’ he asked sensibly as they sped down the road.
Louise contemplated the option for a moment, then said, ‘Obviously it’s possible that I’m overreacting. We can certainly hope that’s the case,’ she added. ‘But if Susanne was trying to tell us something on the phone, it must be because he was there. And if he is, calling could have disastrous consequences. He would immediately suspect something was up.’
Louise’s head was spinning. Lars was in the passing lane, flashing his lights whenever someone didn’t move out of his way quickly enough.
‘Whatever she’s doing, we can be one hundred percent certain that she’s not having a pleasant chat with her mother,’ Louise said emphatically. ‘Definitely not after her mother wrote an open letter to Morgenavisen that upset Susanne so much that Camilla was forced to cut her lunch short to drive out there and see her.’
Once she had said that, she suddenly had doubts. Susanne had taken so many big steps in the past few weeks, done things she would never have done when Louise first met her. Maybe she asked her mother to come over after Camilla’s visit so they could really talk things through. Louise was secretly relieved she hadn’t had a whole emergency response team rush out to cordon off the area and storm the apartment.
She sighed deeply.
‘I don’t know what the fuck’s going on,’ she said, running her hand through her hair, which was down. ‘I just have a terrible feeling. But I am fully aware I’m a little off my game these days, so I really don’t know if my hunch is worth paying attention to or not.’
Lars gave her a quick glance before focusing his concentration back on the road and their high speed.
‘I fucking thought I was pregnant,’ Louise blurted out, apropos of nothing.
She noticed that he slowed down a little and looked at her, so she hurried to add that it had turned out to be a false alarm.
‘It was just my imagination,’ she said with a slightly forced laugh. ‘That wouldn’t have been a good idea. But actually I don’t think it would have ruined my intuition,’ she said, to bring the conversation back to Susanne.
‘No, I’m sure it wouldn’t,’ Lars said, pulling into the middle lane. ‘But obviously if you were preoccupied with all that, it might make you a little more sensitive than usual, you know.’
It took them twenty minutes to drive to Roskilde. Traffic was actually moving along nicely the whole way out on Københavnsvej, but once they got to Røde Port it was backed up.
Louise sat in the passenger seat, drumming her fingers on the dashboard. She knew that would only irritate her more, but she couldn’t stop. All the annoyance bottled up inside her was seething, and the excess energy had to come out one way or another.
Finally they approached the car park
in front of the cluster of two-storey buildings where Susanne’s ground-floor apartment was located. They parked out of view and approached the flat through the other front yards so they couldn’t be seen from Susanne’s living room or bedroom windows, but only from the kitchen and bathroom.
‘What are we going to do?’ Lars asked as they stopped in front of the neighbour’s apartment.
‘I’ll go over and knock, while you wait over here,’ Louise said. ‘If she’s sitting in there chatting with her mother, we’ll go in and say hi. If he’s there, you call it in to Ops and get them out here while I see if I can grab Susanne.’
Lars stopped, his phone out and in his hand. ‘Are you sure I shouldn’t come in too?’
Louise nodded quickly. ‘The whole thing will go smoothly. It’s mostly just a matter of securing her. If he makes a run for it, we’ll let him go and hope there’s a patrol car nearby that can pick him up.’
It looked as if Lars were going to protest, but Louise started walking before he could say anything.
She walked up the path through the front yard until she was right up against the building. With her back to the wall, she moved over to the kitchen window and peeked in.
The kitchen was empty. The door to the living room was ajar, but the crack was so narrow that it was impossible to see anything through it. She ducked under the frosted glass of the bathroom window and proceeded around the building to peer into the living room. Two tealights were lit in small holders, and there were cups and a teapot on the coffee table. That calmed her down, but she couldn’t see any people. The muscles in her body relaxed a little when she realised how unlikely it was that Susanne had been sitting there drinking tea with her rapist.
Louise walked back around to the front door and rang the bell, nodding to Lars to signal that there was someone home. No one came to open the door. Before ringing the bell again, she tried the knob and determined that the door was locked. This time, she held her finger on the ringer for several seconds and heard the sound cutting through the apartment’s hall.
‘We’re going in,’ she signalled to Lars.
When he got close enough, she said, ‘Susanne wouldn’t leave with the candles lit.’
Louise rang the bell again and walked around to the other side of the building. With her hands against the glass, she peered in to see if the ringing doorbell had triggered any response. She watched her partner walk toward the shed and trip over the low, newly planted hedge that separated the front and back yards. She rushed over to help him find something they could use to shatter the glass in the front door. They found a couple of mallets in the shed.
‘If they’re in there, they know we’re here,’ she said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
Lars picked one of the mallets up in both hands and hammered it with all his might against the thick pane of glass in the front door. Louise expected it to shatter and was surprised that it yielded only enough to make a small hole. Lars kept hitting it until the hole in the heavy-duty glass was big enough he could reach an arm through and unlock the door.
‘Susanne!’ Louise shouted into the apartment.
The air was silent. Instinctively she knew someone was there and called out again. She opened the door and stepped in over the broken glass on the floor of the entryway.
‘Susanne!’
She thought she heard a door open as she stepped further into the entryway.
‘Leave, or I’ll kill her.’
The voice was ominous, and the words were enunciated quietly and clearly. Louise guessed the voice came from the apartment’s bedroom. She quickly turned to see if Lars had heard what had been said. She saw that he’d already pulled back and was calling Ops for back-up. They would contact the Roskilde Police right away, but she also knew it would take the negotiating team at least an hour to arrive. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember if she’d seen any of the crisis negotiators or tactical response people around the division. But she drew a total blank.
Louise realised she would have to handle the situation herself. She had decided to go in, and now she couldn’t just pull back and wait for the others to get here. I have to talk to him myself if I want to keep him from taking it out on Susanne, she thought. The local police would arrive soon to cordon off the area. The situation would be locked in, and she had to try to buy some time.
She took a step back and called that he should calm down, that she was here to help resolve the situation.
‘I have a knife. Get out and close the door,’ he yelled.
Louise stepped back over the glass shards, thinking that it wasn’t helping anything that they were standing around shouting back and forth at each other. She could win some time if she could get a real dialogue going with him.
‘Couldn’t we have this conversation over the phone?’ she suggested through the front door.
He didn’t respond.
She offered to toss her mobile phone in and then call it.
He still didn’t respond.
‘Jørgen.’ She pronounced his name loudly and clearly. ‘I really want to talk to you,’ she said, fully aware that using his name could either help or hurt her. And there was still the risk that she had the wrong guy. That it would turn out to be someone else in there with Susanne. Some other deranged lunatic who had now fixated on Susanne as a result of the article and diary entries.
She took her phone out of her pocket and stepped back into the apartment again, over the glass on the floor of the entryway. She opened the door to the living room, squatted down, and slid the phone as far into the room as she could, then quickly got up and stepped back out the front door again to help him feel like she wasn’t pressuring him.
Lars was done talking to the command centre.
‘They’re on their way,’ he said before handing her his phone so she could dial her own number. It rang for a long time before the voicemail recording said that Louise Rick was unable to take the call. She hung up and put the call through again. For the first time in many days, the vague fog was gone from her brain. She felt present, her concentration on high alert. She knew that she shouldn’t underestimate the man she was dealing with. Socio paths want attention, she reminded herself, and she was going to have to play his game if Susanne was going to make it out of here alive.
He answered her phone the third time she called, but didn’t say anything. She could just hear breathing.
‘Is Susanne alive?’ she asked quietly.
‘Yes,’ he confirmed after such a long pause that she almost gave up and decided he wasn’t going to respond.
‘Can I have some kind of sign?’ she asked.
He didn’t say anything, but Louise could tell he was moving.
‘Hi …’ It sounded as if Susanne had forced the word out under duress.
‘Susanne, this is Louise,’ she said trying to sound as if everything were calm and relatively under control.
‘Shut up,’ he said into the phone.
She ignored his rough tone and continued calmly, ‘If you don’t do anything to her, I can help you out of this situation. I know you’re calling the shots, but won’t you tell me what this is about?’
Unfortunately she had a very clear sense of what this was about. Jørgen knew that Susanne could testify against him if the police managed to find him. Karin Hvenegaard would also be able to ID him. Suddenly it occurred to her that she hadn’t given a thought to Karin out in Rødovre since she had visited her. Maybe Jørgen had already paid her a visit. It wasn’t hard to see that things were heating up for him.
Of course he’s feeling threatened, she thought, his predicament becoming clear to her. The two aggravated sexual assaults were now the least of his troubles. The things he’d done to Karin and Susanne were serious enough, but Christina Lerche’s death brought his crimes to another level. No wonder he was feeling the pressure.
Louise spoke firmly in a calm, quiet voice, and strangely enough she also felt calm on the inside. She wasn’t thinking about the consequ
ences of what might happen, just trying to win time. If she succeeded in talking him down enough, he might relent and accept the wisdom of coming out and letting Susanne go.
‘I know you didn’t kill Christina Lerche,’ she said into her phone. ‘Her death was an accident.’
She registered that a number of squad cars had already pulled into the parking lot. More would be coming to set up a perimeter. Now it was a question of keeping the dialogue going until the negotiating team got there and took over, and there was a chance that they would succeed if she fed him everything he wanted to hear in a gentle stream.
He still wasn’t saying anything.
‘It would go a long way if you came out on your own now,’ she continued. ‘Then you could keep the situation from spinning out of control.’
If only he would say something. It concerned her that he remained so quiet. When the silence and the faint static on the line continued, she got nervous that he’d put the phone under one of the couch cushions or somewhere else that would block the sound. He could have closed the door to the bedroom where Susanne was. Louise was suddenly struck by the chilling realisation that he could be assaulting Susanne right now, even as she stood here, naively continuing to talk to him.
She went over to the door and knocked loudly. Leaned forward and listened.
‘It’s too late,’ the ominous voice finally said into the phone.
She couldn’t be sure what he meant, if he meant it was too late for Susanne or for the situation as a whole. She hoped he meant the latter and seized on his words.
‘It’s never too late if you act rationally. It will benefit your case overall if you let her go now.’
‘I don’t believe you. I can see the police.’
‘Those are just patrol officers. They’re here to cordon off the area. That’s the normal procedure before the negotiating team arrives to take over. I’m no expert, just an ordinary assistant detective.’
‘Negotiating team? You want to negotiate?’
