The Stolen Angel

by Sara Blaedel

  The conveyor came to a shuddering halt, prompting the guy with the bottle to loudly exclaim, “That’s it. Tools down. Siesta!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she muttered to herself. The last thing she needed was to be stuck in an airport with a suitcase that had gone AWOL.

  She swiveled around quickly when a man in a yellow vest cleared his throat behind her, and smiled when she realized he was standing with her suitcase. She glanced at the label to make sure. NAJA HOLTEN, sure enough. She tipped him two euros for his help and guessed the suitcase had fallen off the trailer on the way from the plane.

  Swiftly she made her way toward customs and the exit. Once outside the airport building she stood for a moment and let the warmth seep into her body before following the signs for the car rental. She was unaware that the man in the yellow vest had followed her out, and thought nothing of it when she saw him get into a white Toyota parked a bit farther along the curb.

  * * *

  The hotel was situated directly facing the sea and when she pulled up in front of the archway of its entrance, a Spanish flag fluttering on each side, a young man came up and opened the car door for her. Having made sure of her reservation, he took her suitcase from the small trunk and put his hand out for the key. In return he gave her a receipt with a number on it before climbing in behind the wheel.

  Naja Holten watched as the car turned toward the hotel parking area followed by a white Toyota. Then she went inside to reception, where she was received by a good-looking Spanish girl who in fluent English bid her welcome and asked for her passport.

  As she checked her in, the receptionist explained that besides the breakfast room the hotel had two restaurants. There was also a wellness center with a steam room and a gym. She placed a brochure on the counter, turning its pages with a practiced air to show Naja the facilities on offer.

  “You’ll find the gym in the basement next to the spa facility,” she explained, pointing outside toward the garden area where two large swimming pools were separated by a fountain in the middle.

  Naja smiled and picked the brochure up, ready to step aside and make room for the man in line behind her.

  “Just follow the path past the far pool and you’ll find the stairs leading down. There’s a sign saying WELLNESS,” the receptionist told her, “so you should have no trouble finding it.”

  “Sounds good,” Naja replied by way of thanks, glancing toward the first of the two pools where most of the sun beds were already occupied. The temperature may have been a modest sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, but the sun was shining from a cloudless sky and it wouldn’t be long before she was out there, too.

  “Oh, and if there are any phone messages or emails, could you pass them on to me right away, please?” she added, explaining briefly that she was trying to stay offline with her cell phone switched off for the duration of her break, but it was important the film company’s PR department was able to get hold of her in an emergency.

  “Of course,” the receptionist twittered, indicating a board where each room was allocated its own little pigeonhole. As if to make sure Naja understood, she stepped across and patted her hand in the one marked 211.

  “Two-one-one,” she said with a smile, handing her the key card and directing her to follow the curve of the corridor to her superior room facing the beach.

  When Naja Holten turned away with her suitcase, the man behind her had gone.

  13

  Carl Emil woke on Saturday morning with a thumping hangover. It had been a late night. He had drunk far too much good wine and some very large gin and tonics at Umami, where he and a couple of good friends had run up a tab. He turned over on his side and felt his stomach turn with him.

  Since coming home from his interview with the Roskilde police he had found it hard to shake off the experience. It kept flooding back in waves.

  Had his mother really been murdered? Who could have done such a thing?

  The chief superintendent had said so, and the finger of blame had been pointed squarely at his father.

  Even now in his post-alcohol haze he found it to be a wholly ridiculous idea. Unlike the case of his mother, Carl Emil had rather quickly adapted to the notion that his father had decided to take his own life. It made sense for him not to want to be left on his own. However, not for a second had the thought occurred to him that their father might be implicated in his wife’s death.

  It was another reason why he hadn’t been able to bear staying in the night before, along with all the other thoughts preying on his mind. The icon and the money. The insulin. Speculations that churned away as soon as he found a quiet moment.

  The mood in the family had been, as might be expected, rather tense ever since he and Rebekka had ousted their father from Termo-Lux. Their mother had been furious when the change had become a reality, and the day their father formally stepped down from his position as chairman of the board she had appeared unannounced at Carl Emil’s apartment a couple of hours after the meeting at a time when she could be reasonably certain to find him at home. He had never seen her so angry. She lectured him sternly about the virtues of decency and loyalty as they sat facing each other in his living room, before concluding her visit by raking him over the coals and reiterating the inviolable nature of family ties.

  It was clear to him then that their mother had been far more affected by what had occurred inside the company than their father himself seemed to be. But then, he was a businessman and had always kept business life and family life separate.

  Carl Emil buried himself deeper into his duvet.

  Ungrateful, she had called him when she left the apartment that day, and after that he had hardly seen her again.

  Fatigued, he reached over to the bedside table and found his watch. He had booked a Spinning session at the gym, and it started in half an hour.

  Reluctantly, he pulled back the duvet, forcing himself to get up. Besides everything else, he was looking at almost half a billion kroner disappearing out of his hands if he did nothing but lie in bed nursing a hangover. If the Angel of Death was still on his parents’ property, it had to be retrieved so Miklos could close the deal. But he realized there was a very real risk that it wasn’t just the copy that had been taken.

  So much money, and so close. He took a deep breath and told himself he needed to pull himself together and keep a cool head. Just keep calm, he coached himself, padding bleary-eyed to the bathroom and finding the aspirin in the medicine cabinet, his mouth dry as sandpaper. But his sister was right and he wasn’t calm at all. Before long the media were bound to cotton on to the police suspecting their father of their mother’s murder, and when they did all hell would break loose.

  He showered quickly, went back into the bedroom and put on some workout clothes, stuffed a pair of jeans and a shirt into a bag, and found his keys.

  * * *

  A floral display meant for a coffin had been left on the mat outside.

  A wreath with a spray of white and blue flowers whose powerful aroma greeted his nostrils as soon as he opened the door. A flourish of curly gold lettering on the accompanying silk sash said REST IN PEACE, and a card had been inserted between the stalks.

  He hesitated for a second before bending down and plucking the small envelope from the meticulously worked display. He held his breath as he opened it and removed the card inside.

  THE ANGEL OF DEATH, it said.

  Carl Emil dropped the card immediately and leaped back inside the apartment as if his legs had suddenly been licked by flames.

  He stood collecting himself for a moment in the hall, but then when another door opened somewhere on the stairway he stepped quickly forward again, picked up the wreath, and took it inside. His heart thumped in his chest. He wondered fleetingly if it might be some kind of coarse practical joke and whether his friends at that very moment might be gathered at Café Jorden Rundt enjoying a good laugh at his expense. But they knew nothing about the Angel of Death, unless he had been indiscreet at some
point during the night’s proceedings.

  He hoped he hadn’t.

  Once, they had sent a stripper out to another of his friends when they knew he was entertaining important business associates at home, and only a couple of months ago Carl Emil himself had bought plane tickets for the whole crew and surprised them all with a weekend trip to Nice. Having made sure they all met up at Café Victor on Friday afternoon, he sent them all home again to pick up their passports and nothing else before they all piled into a couple of taxis and headed off to the airport. But that had all been good, wholesome fun, nothing that could possibly cause offense.

  No, none of them would ever dream of sending a funeral wreath.

  He slumped down on one of his tall Starck chairs and stared out over the harbor of Tuborg Havn. His thoughts felt like porridge, a vague and inseparable mass. The only thing that seemed clear to him was the fact that someone had left a death threat outside his door while he had been asleep.

  Fear gripped him like a sudden onslaught of winter, and all of a sudden he was freezing cold, his teeth chattering.

  * * *

  “We’ve got to find the Angel,” Carl Emil began when Miklos Wedersøe picked up the phone.

  He told him about the funeral wreath and the white card.

  “They want it. And they’re going to kill me to get it.”

  The words rattled breathlessly out of his mouth despite his trying to remain calm. The shock of what had happened had leaked into his blood and was now an agitated unrest racing through his veins.

  His mother’s murder had very nearly gone undiscovered. If the same people were now after him, they had already demonstrated with all conceivable clarity just what they were capable of.

  “What makes them think I’ve got it?” he asked, as if begging for an answer.

  He took a series of deep breaths, struggling not to lose it completely in a bout of panic. His heart pounded.

  “We’ve got to find that icon.”

  “Take it easy,” Wedersøe replied calmly. “Why would they want to kill you?”

  “Because they’ve killed before!” Carl Emil almost screeched. “Maybe they killed my father, too. We don’t know!”

  “Let’s not discuss it on the phone. Come down here instead and we’ll talk in person. I’ve got a meeting with the cathedral parish council at twelve, but after that I’m available. How does two o’clock sound?”

  “Fine, yes,” Carl Emil snapped back, annoyed by his attorney’s priorities. “I’ll try and find the icon while I’m waiting, shall I?”

  He rummaged around for a big garbage bag under the sink, pressing the wreath and the card down into it before hurrying out to the elevator. He scurried to his car, dumping the bag in one of the green trash containers at the side of the building on his way.

  He tried to appear relaxed as he climbed inside the Range Rover. As usual, the private parking lot was deserted, yet his eyes scanned the area twice before he reversed out. At the first red light he thumped the steering wheel impatiently with the flat of his hand, then tore off along Tuborgvej toward the highway the moment it changed to green.

  * * *

  “It’s possible you’re right,” Miklos Wedersøe conceded when Carl Emil repeated his assertion that whoever was trying to get their hands on the Angel of Death had also left the funeral wreath outside his door.

  Before his meeting with the attorney, Carl Emil had stopped off at Termo-Lux and had actually spent almost an hour searching possible hiding places for the Angel of Death. To begin with he had gone through the vast new storage facility, where consignments of window frames and panes were stored in meticulous order. Then he had searched the rooms under the roof and those in the basement. Finally, he had rummaged through his father’s private cupboards.

  Having no luck, he had then gone over to the old storage building a short distance from the main premises, where regular non-thermal glass was kept stockpiled, some of it dating back to his grandfather’s day. He hoped until the very last that the icon would emerge before him, hidden away among the oldest and most forgotten items, but eventually he gave up without having found so much as a trace of its precious stained glass.

  “We don’t know who removed the reproduction from your father’s office, so it would be rather difficult to state for certain that they have now come back,” Wedersøe said, opening a small plastic bag and handing a paper napkin across the desk.

  Carl Emil nodded, admitting that this at least was true. He had no idea when the Angel of Death had disappeared. It had been some time since he had last set foot inside his father’s home office. He had simply no business there after all the trouble started with the takeover. Most likely Rebekka hadn’t, either, he thought, unless it was she who had taken the icon.

  “But we have to take this seriously,” Carl Emil reiterated, reaching out for the sandwich his attorney handed him.

  Wedersøe looked across the desk at his client.

  “I can assure you I’m taking it very seriously indeed,” he replied. “But if we’re to discuss the matter properly you’re going to have to calm down. As things stand, the police seem to have your father marked down as prime suspect in the case of your mother’s murder, but I’m afraid we must accept that you, too, are of some interest to them in that respect.”

  Carl Emil closed his eyes.

  “I spoke to Nymand late yesterday afternoon. He told me their forensics team found no signs of unlawful entry to your parents’ property. What they did find, however, was that the digital surveillance device at the front door had been deactivated, and from that they secured what they think might be a number of leads that have been sent off for analysis. Nothing would seem to indicate that anyone forced their way into the house. Which means either your mother let her killer in herself or else that person was already inside. The police are leaning toward the latter and suspecting her family.”

  Carl Emil opened his eyes and nodded. “But they don’t know about the Angel,” he said quietly.

  Wedersøe agreed. “And for good reason. Nevertheless, it might be expedient for us to explain to them how things might be connected. Then we can let them go through the property and confiscate the real icon if it should come to light.”

  Carl Emil hesitated before objecting:

  “But that would mean forfeiting any sale.”

  Wedersøe folded his hands behind his head and tipped his chair back.

  “That would be a consequence, yes,” he concurred. “But wouldn’t money be secondary if someone really is out to kill you?”

  Carl Emil screwed his eyes up against the sun that slanted brightly in through the window. He felt the acute need for more aspirin.

  “I wouldn’t put it like that,” he replied, popping two pills from the blister package in his pocket. “The question is more whether to put up with being threatened.”

  He swallowed the pills with a mouthful of the coffee Wedersøe had poured into his cup.

  “I intend not to,” he went on. “But I need to get hold of that icon. If someone is trying to get to me, it’s because they haven’t found it, either.”

  “So you want me to keep the police out of it?” Wedersøe ventured.

  Carl Emil nodded firmly. “Let them proceed from their theory my father did it. What do you think their next move is likely to be?”

  The attorney wiped some crumbs from the desk pad and looked thoughtful.

  “I imagine they’ll put a missing person notice out for your father through Interpol. Domestically, they’ll intensify the search and go public in the media. I don’t think you can avoid being put through the mill again.”

  Carl Emil supposed he was right.

  “I’m going out to the estate now to turn the place upside down,” he announced and got to his feet. “If I can’t find it I’ll have to get Rebekka to help me.”

  “If you can’t find it, she’s not likely to, either,” Wedersøe added rationally.

  Carl Emil smiled.

  “If it�
�s there, she can find it. If it’s not on the estate, then it must be somewhere on the company premises. No one knows the place even remotely as well as she does. I’d have to get her involved, there’d be no two ways about it.”

  “Even if you talk her into helping you search for the icon, and even if you manage to find it, your sister made it very clear that she would not be party to a sale,” Wedersøe pointed out. “And if her mind really is made up, nothing you could say would ever convince her.”

  “On the contrary,” said Carl Emil. “I think I know something that might.”

  14

  Grete Milling had brought a thermos of coffee and proper mugs with her for the journey. She and Melvin sat in the back, chatting quietly all the way there. In the front, Jonas slept, his legs drawn up underneath him, leaving room for Dina on the floor in front of his seat. He didn’t wake up until Louise pulled into the parking lot in Hjerting where Jeanette had lived. She switched off the engine in front of the complex of two-story redbricks with their little gardens facing the road.

  “There it is, over there,” said Grete, pointing in the direction of number 12. “My daughter’s flat’s on the ground floor.”

  The buildings were arranged in a chain of five on one side of a paved footpath, with three more on the other side that seemed to be a bit bigger. Beyond them, Louise saw a large lawn area with benches and tables dotted about, but here in February, the overall impression was bleak and dismal.

  Melvin reached out and helped Grete Milling out of the car. She had already taken the keys from her bag and handed them to Louise.

  “You go in first, I’ll come in a bit,” she said and remained standing with Melvin while Louise and Jonas went up to the building.

  Next to the entrance door they found the mailbox with Jeanette’s name on it. It didn’t look like there was room for any more junk mail or free newspapers: they spilled, wet and pulpy, from the slot, a telltale indication that it had been some time since anyone had been there to empty it.