The Stolen Angel

by Sara Blaedel

  * * *

  He had been there so many times before and was quite familiar with the parking facility in the building’s basement. He knew, too, where to find Carl Emil’s dedicated space.

  Slowly he drove the big Mercedes down the ramp and passed along the row of parked cars.

  He found no pleasure in such concrete and would never choose to live in such a building himself, where privacy was forever compromised by one’s proximity to other occupants. The office environment was different and did not bother him in the same way, though at the office he was never himself. His home provided him with a vast and vital mental space. Space in which to enjoy and savor.

  It was what life was all about.

  Enjoy and savor.

  He took the elevator up and let himself in. The apartment was silent and for a moment he was struck by doubt.

  Was there something he had missed? Something he had failed to understand?

  He closed the door carefully behind him and glanced into the living room with its panorama view of the harbor, noting how tidy everything was. He continued toward the kitchen, passing Carl Emil’s bedroom on the way. The door was ajar, the wardrobe open, a mess of clothes and other items strewn out over the bed.

  He glanced quickly into the empty kitchen before moving on to the guest room and opening the door.

  She was lying on the bed, fully dressed and asleep on top of the duvet, a bag of chips at her side and the TV still switched on.

  His eyes passed over the DVDs and computer games. Some clothes lay folded in a neat pile next to the dresser. Brand-new clothes, with the price tags still attached.

  No time to dwell, he told himself, slipping his hands under her back and lifting her up.

  “Calle,” she mumbled, stirring sufficiently to rub an eye, then returning immediately to sleep.

  She lay in his arms, oblivious as he began to walk, her small body giving a start as he closed the front door behind them and stepped into the elevator.

  He had not considered what he would do if she began to scream, nor did he care to think about it as he crossed through the basement to the car.

  There, at the Mercedes, he knew he needed to put her down. Gently he let her slip from his arms onto the concrete, supporting her weight until she lay flat and his hands were free. He unlocked the door, but the chemical tubs on the passenger side would hamper his plan. She would just have to sit with her legs on top of them, he told himself, then leaped in fright when the scream came, as shrill as it was sudden.

  Her terrified voice ricocheted off the concrete walls, piercing into his ears and forcing him to put his hand over her mouth.

  Instinctively he flung the car door open, gripping her tight with both hands and bundling her inside as she screamed again, so loudly he feared his eardrums would be perforated by the strident, earsplitting tone.

  It all happened so quickly he had no time to check if anyone had seen them. The girl thrashed so wildly and her scream was so excruciating he thought he would go mad.

  He had been thinking he would tell her he knew her mother and uncle and that they had asked him to collect her. It would have worked, he was a good and persuasive talker—it was how he earned a living.

  But now it had gone wrong and it was imperative he shut her up.

  He slammed the car door and saw the way her hands immediately scrabbled to open it again. It was already locked, of course, but before he could reach the driver’s side she was over the wheel, pressing down on the horn and setting off the alarm at the same time.

  Sweat burst from his pores again. He yanked the door open and hurled himself at her, wrenching her away from the wheel. In his pocket he still had the hypodermic with the silicone hardener he had not needed at the Hotel Prindsen.

  The fleeting realization was a lapse in concentration and he was too slow to stop her before she bit deeply into his hand, causing him to yelp with pain. Her teeth were like ice picks thrust into the flesh of his hand, and though he tried to pull away they kept their grip.

  He had lost control. Rage rose up inside him, as suddenly and as violently as on previous occasions when he had used the hypodermic.

  He hit her as hard as he could in the face and she relented.

  * * *

  She lay in a heap on the passenger seat, her eyes closed. He had taken the chamois from the glove compartment and stuffed it in her mouth, tied her hands and feet with strips torn from the sheet he had taken from the hotel to protect the icon.

  It had all happened so quickly, and yet he had no sense of how much time had actually passed. Now he would drive home and make ready. Collect himself and calm down. He nodded with resolve, his thoughts already focusing on how best he might exploit the Sachs-Smith grandchild now being firmly in his possession. There was no doubt in his mind that right now she was a considerable asset.

  Briefly, he considered driving back down to Roskilde, taking Carl Emil’s Range Rover, and making a dash for it out of the country.

  But then what about his women?

  And the Angel of Death that was to complete his exhibition?

  It was quite wrong; the very thought was anathema to him. Everything had become so untidy, and now his hand was bleeding, too.

  34

  This time, Camilla didn’t care where she parked as she pulled up at the Hotel Prindsen. Seeing that the police had gotten there first she simply abandoned the car inside the lot entrance, ran through the yard and up the steps to the glass door. There she was halted abruptly by a man who called her name.

  She wheeled around and saw Nymand come panting behind her.

  “It’s on the first floor,” she said, waiting for him to catch up.

  “My people are trying to get access now,” he said, with a nod toward reception.

  He was clearly annoyed by the receptionist’s apparent reluctance to hand over a key at the police’s request.

  “I booked the room, so they can give the key to me,” Camilla replied, striding toward the desk without noticing the way Nymand initially stood transfixed, gaping at her in astonishment.

  With the key card in her hand she stopped on the landing and waited for him again as he hauled his heavy weight up the stairs, clutching the banister for support.

  “I retrieved the icon from the manor on Walther Sachs-Smith’s instructions,” she explained, Nymand responding only with a breathless nod. Most probably he had already worked that out, Camilla thought to herself, bounding up the final flight.

  As they came out into the long corridor she put her ear to the door and listened, but the room seemed quiet. All she could hear was Nymand’s wheezing in her wake.

  She knocked cautiously.

  No answer.

  She knocked again, harder this time, but when there was still no response she inserted the key card into the slot and moved aside to make way for Nymand, who stepped forward and opened the door.

  Carl Emil Sachs-Smith lay sprawled across the bed on his stomach. His face was turned toward the window, but from where Camilla was standing she could clearly see the way one eye was wide open and staring unnaturally into the darkness. His arms were splayed out at his sides as if he had fallen from a height.

  Nymand had put the light on but as yet he remained just inside the door. Camilla stood on her toes to peer over his shoulder.

  She knew already. It was obvious.

  The Angel of Death was gone, and the dirty cloth in which it had been wrapped when she had retrieved it from the family estate lay in a heap under the desk.

  She stepped back slowly, allowing the police in to do their job. She paced the corridor then sank down at the far end with her back against the wall before phoning Louise.

  * * *

  “Carl Emil is dead,” she began. “His body’s in room one-oh-one at the Hotel Prindsen and the icon’s gone. Nymand just got here.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Louise said at the other end and hung up.

  Camilla sensed her friend’s exhaustion. They had yet to talk about
what was going on with Jonas. Markus had told her about the fight he had been in after he got home from school that day, but she had not had the chance to ask what it had been about. Now more than twenty-four hours had passed since the little girl had disappeared and Camilla felt run-down, not so much physically as mentally.

  She thought about Frederik. He was there all the time, among all her other thoughts. She had called him and told him his father was on his way home to Denmark.

  She had wondered why he had not sounded more surprised, but on the other hand she had always had an idea he never really believed his father to be dead. If he ever did, he had certainly never seemed particularly affected by the fact. Only now did the thought occur to her that he probably had people keeping an eye on the house on Kauai. If so, then they had surely reported back to him that an elderly gray-haired man had been observed sipping chilled white wine on the deck these past few months.

  She missed Frederik and longed to feel his tanned and sinewy arms around her. And now Carl Emil was lying dead in this hotel room and she would have to call him again. She owed him the courtesy. Or perhaps it was more because she needed to hear his voice?

  Still slouched against the wall, on the plush hotel carpeting, she found her phone and pressed the number.

  “Hi,” she said when he answered, and began to cry as she told him about his brother. “They don’t know where your niece is. Carl Emil is dead and the icon is missing.”

  At first her words were a shock.

  “Where are you?” he asked, prompting the longing she felt inside to well up again.

  She took a deep breath and tried to regain control of her voice.

  “I’m sorry I had to tell you this over the phone,” she said instead of answering his question.

  “Where are you?” he repeated.

  “At the Prindsen. We just found your brother. He’s lying on the bed.”

  “I’m on my way,” said Frederik. Camilla struggled to make sense of what he meant.

  She saw Nymand coming toward her.

  “What do you mean, on your way?” she asked, getting to her feet.

  “I just got into Copenhagen. I was in London when you called this afternoon.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me?” she began, only to stop short when she saw the expression on Nymand’s face. “Listen, I’ll call you back,” she promised, and hung up.

  “What?” she breathed, staring at Nymand in fearful anticipation as she walked forward to meet him.

  “The contact phone the kidnappers have been using is in that room with him,” he told her gravely. “They’ve cut off all communication and have taken off with both the girl and the icon. You’ve got to tell us exactly what’s been going on and who you’ve been talking to.”

  35

  Louise sat on the sofa with her arms around Rebekka. She had stopped trembling but was still crying, quietly and with her eyes closed.

  They had been sitting the same way since Louise had informed her of her brother’s death.

  “He was threatened,” Rebekka suddenly whispered. “Several times.”

  Louise straightened up as best she could while still keeping a comforting arm around the grieving woman, as if any further withdrawal would cause her to change her mind and fall silent again.

  “Threatened? In what way?”

  “Someone said they were going to kill him.”

  Louise took her arm away now and asked Rebekka to open her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know much about it,” she mumbled without looking up.

  “Please tell me as much as you know,” Louise said, resisting the urge to shake some life into the woman. “Your brother has just been killed and your daughter has been kidnapped. You have to tell me what you know.”

  Rebekka sat motionless, then slowly told her about the coffin display that had been left outside Carl Emil’s door.

  “He was scared,” she said. “I could sense it the day he came and asked for my help.”

  “How did he think you could help?” Louise asked, furious with herself for not having pursued her suspicions that the police were being kept in the dark.

  “He wanted the Angel of Death, the real one. We didn’t know the one in the office was a copy or that the real one was so priceless.”

  Rebekka buried her face in her hands.

  “How much is it worth?” Louise demanded, holding her breath.

  “More than a billion kroner. But I was against selling. The threats came shortly after they received an offer.”

  “I’m sorry you obviously didn’t trust us enough to tell us this earlier,” Louise said, struggling with the anger that rose up inside her but deciding not to tell Rebekka that doing so might have saved her brother’s life.

  “There was a second death threat a couple of days later,” Rebekka went on, finally looking Louise in the eye. “Someone left a headstone outside my brother’s door. It was inscribed with his name and date of birth as well as the date of his death.”

  She paused for a moment before going on.

  “He was at his wit’s end.”

  Louise could well imagine. She tried to restrain her anger.

  “If someone had a headstone made, we should be able to find out where and who ordered it,” she said, rising to her feet.

  “No,” Rebekka said immediately. “It wasn’t a proper headstone, just a flat rock with the words painted on.”

  “When did it say he was supposed to die?” Louise probed, fixing her eyes on her.

  “Tomorrow,” Rebekka answered. “Or rather today,” she corrected herself, realizing a new day had already begun.

  Louise shook her head, but said nothing.

  “Isabella went missing,” Rebekka offered defensively, avoiding Louise’s gaze. “I had to concentrate on my daughter.”

  Louise did not respond, going into the far room instead to wake up Thiesen, who sat dozing in a chair. He stood up immediately and followed her back into the living room.

  “It turns out Carl Emil Sachs-Smith received death threats during this last week,” Louise explained after they had drawn a couple of chairs over to the coffee table.

  Rebekka did not seem to be listening. She had leaned her head back and had closed her eyes.

  “Apparently, there was a plan to sell the Angel of Death, and that may have been what sparked the threats and later the kidnapping.”

  Rebekka nodded and with eyes still closed explained to them that she had been convinced all along that everything that had occurred had been the result of Carl Emil having revealed the secret of the icon in the family’s possession.

  “Had he found a buyer?” Thiesen inquired in a tone that prompted Rebekka to snap open her eyes.

  “Yes,” she replied. “It was all going through our attorney and an American contact of his in New York.”

  “Illegally,” said Palle, who had entered the room. “Which presumably is why no one has mentioned this before.”

  Rebekka nodded. “I didn’t want to sell.”

  Louise hesitated, unsure for a second if she ought to tell her of the disastrous turn of events that had occurred. Clearly, she had yet to fully comprehend the gravity of the situation.

  “Nymand and his officers found the kidnappers’ phone in the hotel room where your brother died.” She then said, pausing and looking at the girl’s mother compassionately, “We no longer have contact with your daughter.”

  For a moment the four of them sat staring at each other without speaking, until Rebekka began to shake her head.

  “No!” she said. “No, no, no!”

  The heartrending scream that followed shattered the silence and forced the two men to look away. At that moment, the doorbell rang, and Thiesen jumped thankfully to his feet to answer it.

  Though it was well past midnight, Palle had somehow managed to find a crisis counselor on call from the Sankt Hans psychiatric hospital. It had been Thiesen’s suggestion that Rebekka receive immediate help.

  *
* *

  After instructing Marybeth to remain with Rebekka while she slept in the living room, so she wouldn’t wake up and find herself alone, Louise gathered up her coat and waited for Nymand and one of his men to come and collect her. Before they were informed of Carl Emil’s death she had been so tired she could have slept standing up. Now her fatigue had vanished.

  “You’re sure you’re not too tired?” Palle inquired as he came out into the hall with Rebekka’s spare keys to her brother’s apartment.

  “I’m fine,” she replied quickly. It was just after 2 a.m. Thiesen had suggested they go home and get some sleep, but as long as they had no idea of the little girl’s whereabouts Louise had no intention of going home.

  The negotiation unit was no longer needed. With the icon already gone, they had nothing left to bargain with. Louise felt herself overcome with frustration and a deflating sense of failure, so when Nymand suggested it might be helpful for her to go to Hellerup, the choice was a no-brainer.

  * * *

  “His flat’s up on the ninth floor,” Louise said as they passed through the darkness toward the entrance door. “Did anyone actually get hold of that attorney?”

  “No.”

  Nymand shook his head and seemed weary. His movements were slow and heavy, and it occurred to Louise that this was now his second night without sleep. He had been on the job ever since Rebekka reported the kidnapping.

  “He wasn’t home, but my people are going to try again first thing. He needs to tell us about their plans to sell the icon and who was involved.”

  “There can’t be that many customers for such an incredibly expensive piece,” Louise mused as the elevator landed with a gentle bump and the doors slid aside.

  “Probably more than one would imagine,” the officer who had driven them back to the capital posited. He handed her a pair of thin latex gloves. “I’ve heard that in the UK a handful of the most established dealers have been known to pool their resources and make a purchase if a customer has shown interest in a certain artifact. After the sale they divide the proceeds among them. I’m sure the buyers are there.”