by Sara Blaedel
“He’s in a meeting,” Hanne informed her when she asked if she could speak to her boss.
“Who’s got the Jeanette Milling case?”
“Just a mo, I’ll look,” Hanne replied. “I’m not sure there’s anyone specifically assigned to that one. It’s been there awhile and quite a few have come in since, so it’s probably with Ragner himself. He gets the files on his desk once they’ve gone cold.”
The former missing person department of the Danish National Police had been discontinued a few years before, its various functions being farmed out to the local police districts. Now the department comprised Rønholt, two constables allocated as part of the recent police reform, and Hanne. No wonder they never made any headway, Louise thought. The statistics showed sixteen hundred missing persons a year. There was no way they could investigate even a fraction.
“What does his schedule look like after that?” Louise asked, glancing at Lars Jørgensen to make sure there were no objections to her heading off.
Jørgensen gave her a nod. He had rolled his chair over to the shelving and was busy rummaging through a stack of folders that needed filing.
“Let’s have a look here,” Hanne replied, and Louise heard the clatter of her typing at the other end.
“He’s due off at one o’clock. He’s flying to Paris with Didder this afternoon,” the secretary informed her with particular effervescence.
Louise stifled a laugh.
Ragner Rønholt was renowned for his way with women. Never married and just past sixty, he had never sought to conceal the fact that he loved all his girlfriends.
“If you get over here now, you might just catch him before he goes. He’s got no more meetings after this one.”
“Can I get you to put it in his diary that I’m on my way, so he doesn’t take off before I get there?” Louise asked. “I promise to make it short, only I’ve just had Jeanette’s mother on the phone and she’s in a terrible state. Someone’ll have to tell the poor woman soon that her daughter probably won’t be coming home again, and if that someone happens to be me I need to read the report before I do.”
“You just pop over, I’ll make sure he makes time for you. But like I said, he’ll be out of the door at one. His suitcase is all packed and ready here.”
“All right, see you in a bit,” said Louise and concluded the call. She had only just gotten to her feet when her cell phone thrummed on the desk.
“What absence?” she exclaimed, completely taken aback when Jonas’s class teacher asked if there was any particular reason for his absence these past couple of weeks.
“I was just wondering if it had to do with him going into therapy again,” the teacher explained. “In which case it would have been good to have been informed.”
“Yes,” Louise answered swiftly, her thoughts churning.
“Today he left after the ten o’clock break and yesterday he wasn’t here at all.”
Louise dismissed the idea of pretending it was something she knew about.
“I don’t understand at all,” she said instead.
He was always there when she came home from work, or else he was over in Frederiksberg Park with the dog, but then his lessons ended at two anyway.
“Very often he goes home at lunchtime.”
“Why haven’t you mentioned this to me?” Louise asked.
“I’m mentioning it now,” the teacher came back at her. “But you don’t know anything about it, you say?”
“No,” Louise acknowledged. “No, I don’t. Has anything happened at school that might make him want to stay away?”
The teacher hesitated. “He’s not an easy child to get along with,” she ventured after a moment.
Not easy? Jonas was the sweetest, easiest boy in all the world, Louise protested silently, sensing the anger well up inside her.
“I don’t agree with you on that,” she said curtly. “He’s never neglected his homework or school before.”
“I’m just ringing to tell you there’s a problem,” the teacher cut in. “And problems don’t go away just because parents, or foster parents, choose not to acknowledge them.”
“No, of course not.”
Louise capitulated, not wishing to start an argument with the boy’s teacher and unwilling to defend him after he had gone down to Melvin’s when Camilla and Markus came. He didn’t come back until they had gone, and Dina had been so hungry she wolfed down her food faster than ever before.
Thinking about it, Louise conceded she’d had an idea there might be something wrong, but she had put his sulks down to puberty problems. But what did she know about that? She had never lived with a teenager, had never even had a child in the house before him. Nevertheless, she’d had no idea he was skipping school.
“I’ll speak to him about it,” she promised and thanked the teacher for calling.
She felt weighed down as she drove out to the Search Department.
* * *
There was a vase full of red tulips on the reception desk. Behind it, Hanne was chattering away on the phone with a big smile on her face, acknowledging Louise with a lift of her eyebrows when she knocked on the counter.
The door of the chief super’s office was open. Louise signaled to Hanne to carry on with her conversation, she would see herself in.
The head of the Danish National Police Search Department, Ragner Rønholt, got to his feet and spread out his arms for a hug as she stepped toward him.
“Nice to see you, Rick,” he beamed. “How are things over with your lot?”
“Fine.” She smiled back. “Willumsen’s been off on vacation all week. He’s back on Monday, though, so there’ll be no more slacking then.” There was no need to mention that Michael Stig had been acting head in Willumsen’s absence and had been driving them even further up the wall.
Police Superintendent Willumsen’s loud and boastful manner was known by most in the Copenhagen Police, but while on occasion she found him insufferable to work with, Louise nonetheless rather liked him in a way. In his own words, he was either yes, no, or fuck off. There was nothing in between, a fact she found quite refreshing, and at least you knew where you stood. Michael Stig on the other hand was a detective constable like the rest of them, but ever since he had taken a management course he never missed an opportunity to boss his colleagues about.
“What an awful thing with Willumsen’s wife. Cancer of the uterus, so I believe?”
“Yes,” Louise said. “They removed a rather large tumor, but it seems they’re not sure whether they got the whole thing.”
“Just goes to show. Enjoy life while it’s there, I say.”
Rønholt indicated the small suitcase behind the door before changing the subject.
“I understand from Hanne that you’ve spoken to Grete Milling.”
Louise nodded. “Regularly, in fact,” she replied. “I think maybe the reason she phones me is to make sure her daughter’s disappearance hasn’t been passed on to Homicide. The thing is, I don’t really know what to say to her anymore, not having been involved in the case. The lease has been terminated on Jeanette’s flat now and the rental agency has apparently forgotten to give notice to her mother.”
“Bailiffs now, then, is it?” Rønholt inquired, offering her a peppermint.
Louise accepted with a nod. “The Esbjerg flat’s being cleared out this weekend and she called me to try and get the agent to give her some more time. She still thinks her daughter’s coming home. What do I tell her when she calls?”
Rønholt picked out the thirty-year-old woman’s file and opened the folder.
“Normally it’s me she calls,” he responded after a moment. “There’s not a lot to say, so it tends to be rather brief. After the last time, I called the Spanish police for an update, but as far as they’re concerned the case is cold, no developments whatsoever.”
He took out the summary and skimmed it quickly.
“From the moment she disappeared from the hotel there’s nothing to go on.
She seems to have just vanished after leaving the breakfast room. Local police found her cell phone in her room along with her wallet.”
He smoothed his neat beard.
“Have you been through her flat in Esbjerg?” Louise asked.
Rønholt nodded. “Top to bottom.”
He listed all they knew, raising a finger for each point:
“Farewell note: none found. Emails: nothing untoward on her computer. Money: bank account untouched, no withdrawals apart from the currency she took out for her vacation. We’ve checked she was on the flight out, and witnesses confirm she arrived safely at the hotel.”
He shook his head.
“We’ve got nothing,” he reiterated. “And to be honest, Jeanette Milling’s disappearance is one of the more frustrating I’ve come across. We’ve been in full contact with the Spanish police throughout. We’ve even had some of our own people down there, but the fact of the matter is we’ve made no headway. Either she planned her own disappearance so meticulously she can’t be traced, or else she fell victim to a crime. In either case, her trail stops at the hotel. Who knows what happened. The case stays open, at least until a body turns up.”
“Under the circumstances, I don’t really see how you can defend not telling her mother how unlikely it is her daughter’s going to come back,” Louise said. “It’s almost unbearable letting her cling to a hope none of us here shares.”
Rønholt nodded pensively. “Perhaps, though I’d say she comes across as quite rational. But you’re right, she doesn’t seem to be entertaining the possibility that her daughter might be dead. I’ll send Thune out to have a word with her on Monday, dampen her expectations, explain the sad realities. Hopefully, she’ll realize.”
“Monday?” Louise exclaimed. “But that’ll be too late. The flat’s being cleared this weekend and she’s intending to go over there.”
She threw out her hands despairingly.
“It’ll be too much for her to cope with on her own. It’s all her daughter’s things. The case is still open, it’d be irresponsible just to leave her to it. Someone needs to be there for her. I don’t think she has anyone besides her daughter.”
Rønholt glanced up at the clock on the wall. “I can’t send anyone over there today, not now,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure Esbjerg won’t have the personnel for that sort of thing on a weekend.”
“There must be something you can do,” Louise persisted. “What if she breaks down?”
He nodded and conceded she was right. She could see him weighing up the possibilities.
“You’re used to talking to people in crisis situations,” he said after a second. “How about you assisting us and taking fru Milling over there with you? I’ll square it with Willumsen and make sure you get the proper overtime.”
Louise dropped her hands to her sides again. It wasn’t the extra money—it wasn’t that much anyway, not even for being called out on a weekend—it was more something about working on missing person cases that had always appealed to her. It was like watching a movie backward: She knew the ending but needed to work her way back to the beginning in order to understand the plot.
“Okay,” she said, immediately reaching for the case folder on Rønholt’s desk. “But I need to go and talk to her first.”
“Thanks,” said Rønholt. “She lives out in Dragør.”
“Right, then.”
Louise got to her feet while he wrote down the woman’s address for her. She asked him, too, for the number of the detective constable attached to the case over in Esbjerg so that she might get in touch with him if they needed to get hold of a crisis counselor.
8
Carl Emil buried his face in his hands and asked the female detective to repeat what she had just said.
He had not been properly awake when the Mid and West Zealand Police had phoned just after nine that morning. At first he had asked them to call back later, only to be instructed to present himself at Roskilde Police Station at eleven in the company of his sister instead.
“We are no longer certain your mother’s death was a suicide,” the policewoman said again, looking at him firmly across the round conference table in the chief superintendent’s brightly appointed office. “New information has come to light that would seem to indicate murder.”
“What do you mean?” Rebekka immediately cut in, swiveling toward the more senior officer.
Nymand had sat down at his own desk to allow the female officer to conduct the proceedings. He was the one who had phoned and summoned the two siblings for a meeting, with no further explanation of what that might entail. Nymand had prepared his investigator for the fact that Rebekka and Carl Emil Sachs-Smith would in all probability be expecting it to concern their father’s disappearance. Perhaps they might even be hoping his body had been found so that they might finally go ahead with dividing up their parents’ estate.
“Some results have come in from the most recent analyses conducted in the case,” the detective explained.
“Case?” Carl Emil exclaimed in surprise. “You mean our mother’s death is a case? I hadn’t realized.”
The air inside the office felt warm and clammy, and although it was painted white and light streamed in from the big windows, the room seemed cramped. The chief superintendent had plastered the walls with framed Scandinavian art that had the effect of making the space contract toward the middle.
Carl Emil perspired, his clear blue eyes fixed on the female officer in front of him.
“It is now, yes,” the woman officer replied, glancing over at Nymand, who nodded affirmatively. “Our assumption until now has been suicide, as you know. However, new tests carried out by the Department of Forensic Chemistry have revealed that besides the very potent sleeping medicine found in her stomach, there was also a rather considerable amount of insulin present in your mother’s blood. Since your mother was not diabetic and had never been prescribed any medicine to combat that disease, we have reason to believe that we are now dealing with a crime.”
“That can’t be true,” Rebekka burst out, her angry gaze shifting from the detective to the chief superintendent. “There were two empty bottles of tablets on her bedside table.”
Nymand nodded. “The autopsy indeed showed high concentrations of sleeping medicine,” he replied. “But with these new analyses, I’m afraid there is no doubt whatsoever that your mother was killed by means of insulin.”
Carl Emil pulled off his sweater and dumped it over the back of the chair next to him before bypassing the blond detective and looking Nymand straight in the eye. “So what you’re claiming is that someone gained access to our parents’ house, killed our mother, and then left again without taking anything with them?” he said, a tad more sarcastic than intended. “Our mother owned some rather precious jewelry. And what wasn’t locked away she kept in the box on the bedroom dresser.”
“We’re not claiming anything,” Nymand rejoined calmly. “We are, however, informing you of a new development in the case, and that henceforth we shall be investigating your mother’s death as a murder.”
“The jewelry was all still there when we found her,” Rebekka added, folding her hands together under her chin and thereby causing her Rolex watch to slide down her arm. “There was no sign of any break-in. The police said so themselves.”
Carl Emil sensed her looking at him and kept his eyes on the female detective. He thought about the Angel of Death but said nothing.
“For God’s sake,” he exclaimed instead, throwing up his arms. “The house was full of valuables—the silverware was there for the taking and the walls are covered in very costly art. If anyone broke in they’d have made off with at least some of it, surely?”
Nymand agreed. “Indeed. Your mother clearly must have let the perpetrator into the house herself,” he said. “Therefore, a team of forensic officers has been dispatched to the property and is already at work on the house’s exterior.”
The chief superintendent rose to his feet and a
pproached them, placing a search warrant on the conference table for their perusal.
Rebekka paled and fidgeted nervously with her finger rings. Carl Emil, still aware of her piercing eyes watching him, nodded slowly.
Nymand went back to his desk, sitting down heavily again in his chair.
“We know this comes as a shock,” the woman detective said, picking up the thread again. “But as you have suggested yourselves, there seems to be no indication of any intent toward robbery or theft. Your father didn’t report anything missing, either, so I think we can safely rule out profit as a motive.”
She spoke slowly, enunciating every word, her blue eyes calmly considering them both in turn.
“Therefore,” she went on unhurriedly, “I need to ask if you know of any reason at all why anyone would wish to kill your mother.”
Carl Emil shook his head mechanically. His thoughts were swimming, sweat trickling from the pores under his shirt.
“Might she have been having an affair?” the detective ventured, adding: “An affair your father may have discovered?”
The ensuing silence was so pronounced, Carl Emil heard his sister gasp. Slowly, she rose to her feet and turned to face the chief superintendent. Her dark eyes were almost black.
“Now, you listen to me,” she began. “Are you trying to insinuate that our mother had a lover?”
She stood for a moment as she regained control over her quivering voice.
“And furthermore, that our father killed her?”
Without realizing, she had stepped toward Nymand and was already in his face.
“We’re not insinuating anything,” the chief superintendent said dismissively. “But we have to investigate the possibility in view of your father disappearing after the funeral. Perhaps he had a mistress? Perhaps they made off together? We don’t know.”
Carl Emil glanced at his sister, who had remained standing, and shook his head.
“I have never had any reason whatsoever to suspect either my mother or my father of having an affair,” he said, fixing his eyes on the detective in front of him. “They were together all the time. If they went away on trips, it was always together. If they went out, they went together. They were together in life, that’s how they lived.”
