The Stolen Angel

by Sara Blaedel

  “You could at least talk to her,” Rebekka persisted, mentioning almost in an aside that Walther had now come home. “He landed a couple of hours ago and he wants you to put more people on the case.”

  “We don’t have any more people,” Louise snapped back, sensing how her lack of sleep suddenly boosted her annoyance levels. “We’re working around the clock to find your daughter. You must trust us to do our work properly.”

  A lull ensued.

  “But you aren’t,” Rebekka said. “If you’d been doing your work properly, my brother wouldn’t be dead and Isabella would have been found.”

  Louise hung up for fear of losing her temper and reminding Rebekka in no uncertain terms that her having withheld information had most certainly hampered the police in their inquiries.

  She told Lars Jørgensen about the psychic who had called Nymand.

  They were always there lurking in such cases, and they knew everything. All they had to do was close their eyes and feel the presence of the spirits, and all details of where and how even the most spectacular crimes had taken place would be mysteriously revealed to them. But they held no water with Louise, although she knew that the head of Homicide, Hans Suhr, took them seriously enough to place their predictions in the pile for further investigation whenever they landed on his desk. “What have we got to lose?” he always said.

  He was right, of course, apart from the time they wasted.

  “We’d better get a locksmith,” said Jørgensen, his phone already to his ear.

  She nodded and went over to where the steps led down to the cellar, climbing up onto the low whitewashed wall to look in at a window that was slightly higher than the others. Here she found herself peering into a small guest toilet where a mirror in a gilded frame hung above a little sink, all seemingly spotless and with no sign of recent use.

  She jumped down again, only half listening as Jørgensen instructed the duty officer at the Mid and West Zealand Police to send a locksmith out to the address right away. That done, he asked to be put through to Nymand and explained to him briefly that they would be forcing entrance to the attorney’s property.

  They wandered back to the car to wait for the locksmith. The cold had already numbed their fingertips, and Lars Jørgensen switched the engine on and turned the heater up. As the warm air blasted out into the car interior, Louise began to feel drowsy. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, and dropped off as easily as if she had taken a sleeping pill.

  * * *

  “Front door or cellar?” said a voice, jarring her back from sleep. A young man was standing in the driveway; she guessed the locksmiths must have sent an apprentice.

  “As long as we get in, that’s all that matters,” Lars Jørgensen answered, striding over to the front door as Louise got out of the car.

  The young man considered the lock.

  “Not an easy one, this,” he said and clicked his tongue with studied skepticism. His hair was long on top and short at the sides, and in his left ear he wore a stud. It looked all wrong against his overalls and black T-shirt. However, after a few seconds and a couple of squeezes of his pick gun, he stepped back with satisfaction: “There we go. Piece of cake, as long as you know what you’re doing.”

  He beamed them a smile while Louise wondered if there were locksmiths who didn’t know what they were doing.

  * * *

  The floor in the hallway was black-and-white-checkered marble, classically elegant, Louise observed as they stepped inside. The walls boasted high paneling; a staircase with a black banister and a black stair carpet in the middle wound its way up to the first floor. Everything else was white. Poul Henningsen’s great pendant Artichoke Lamp in copper hung from the ceiling above the staircase.

  Louise noted the attention to detail. Not that she expected it would be significant to them in any way, but it helped her form an impression of the person who lived there.

  “I wonder if he was single,” she mused out loud as Lars Jørgensen came in after having updated Nymand. She thought she remembered Rebekka saying that their attorney was a workaholic of the kind who left no time aside for any private life to speak of, but on the other hand found it quite natural to spend absolutely heaps of money on themselves. She could see how right she was. Over by the fireplace was an Arne Jacobsen Egg Chair, and the TV was by Bang & Olufsen.

  There was nobody downstairs. They had gone through all the rooms. The interior decoration, however exquisite, came across almost too perfect. Even the fondest aficionado of Danish Modern would surely find it overdone, Louise thought to herself, following Lars Jørgensen upstairs.

  To the right was a bathroom done out in black marble with a huge shower area and a Jacuzzi in the corner. The towels were thick and white, plush bordering on decadent, making her think of a luxury hotel.

  Maybe he was gay, she thought. There was something feminine about the room, and there was a scent of lavender in the air, like a soap she kept in her own bathroom at home.

  She had thought of him as quite masculine when they had met at Rebekka’s, perhaps because he was bald and drove such a big Mercedes—the first impressions he gave could hardly be more potent. The thought confused her as she went through his house.

  “Come here,” Lars Jørgensen called to her.

  Louise followed his voice to the back room that seemed to be the attorney’s home office.

  On a notice board next to the desk were photographs of Christian icons. THE ARCHANGEL MICHAEL, ANGEL OF THE SUN, a caption said under one. Beside it was another angel, depicted kneeling and clad in a red cloak, lily in hand. Underneath it was written THE ANGEL OF THE MOON, but the words had been crossed out and replaced. Now it said THE ANGEL OF DEATH.

  Lars Jørgensen studied it with her.

  There was a photo of Roskilde Cathedral, too, and a notice about a meeting of the cathedral parish council along with a contact list of phone numbers belonging to the council’s members. The attorney himself was third on the list.

  “Is he religious, or what?” Jørgensen wondered, but Louise wasn’t listening. On the wall above the desk were four portrait photographs. Four faces in gilded frames. One of them was Jeanette Milling.

  Her partner was still going on about the icons on the notice board and the parish council, but Louise was somewhere else entirely. On the desk next to an antique silver box containing writing implements lay a thin gold chain with a ruby heart.

  Louise recognized it from photos Rebekka had shown her. At once she felt gripped by fear at these disparate signals she was unable to fit together.

  “We’ve got to turn this place upside down,” she burst out a second later, and was already down the stairs before Lars Jørgensen had recovered from the fright. Her partner knew nothing about the ruby heart and had most likely seen nothing menacing about the portraits at all. Nonetheless he leaped into action and followed her downstairs.

  “Access to the cellar only from the garden,” he barked as Louise scanned the kitchen for the stairs. “Do you want me to call for some backup?”

  She shook her head quickly, patting to make sure her service pistol sat snugly in its shoulder holster as she ran out into the hallway. Her every cell prickled with anxiety and made her skin creep.

  * * *

  Behind the house they entered a neatly kept garden. The leaves had been raked from the lawn, and all was orderly and meticulous.

  “It’s locked,” Jørgensen shouted from the door at the bottom of the steps.

  “Get the locksmith,” Louise instructed. “He’ll have to come back.”

  Her partner was already calling the number as he ran toward the driveway. Louise followed him and saw him turn the corner. She heard a car door slam and then another, after which he returned with the young apprentice who came walking up with a bottle of cola in one hand and his tool in the other.

  It seemed he had been taking his time rather than hurrying back to his boss.

  “We’ve got to get that cellar door open,” Lar
s Jørgensen told him, leading the way around the side of the house.

  They stood and waited while the young man went down the steps and muttered a few swear words about it not being one of the easy ones before turning to them with a triumphant little nod.

  They flew down the steps and fumbled around in the dark looking for the lights. The windows facing the garden had been bricked up, but it was easy to see they where they had been.

  “What’s that smell?” Louise asked, stopping in her tracks.

  “Maybe he paints,” Lars Jørgensen suggested. “It’s definitely chemicals of some sort. Turpentine, perhaps.”

  “It smells more like nail polish remover, only a lot stronger,” Louise responded, hurrying toward a wooden door at the end of the passage. She opened it and poked her head into the room, but was unable to see anything at all, apart from the fact that it was quite small and seemed empty. She closed the door again.

  “Down here’s locked,” said Jørgensen from the other end.

  “I didn’t even check to see if there were any keys upstairs. I’ll go and look,” Louise said.

  She ran up the steps, wondering for a moment if it was wise to split up, but she was already at the front of the house again. Somehow, she had an unpleasant feeling about what they might find behind that locked door.

  People’s bizarre sex fetishes were not something she cared to learn more about, and if the finicky order of the house’s stylish interior was anything to go by it would not surprise her in the slightest if there was something contrastingly messy down there locked away out of sight, she thought, her eyes darting as she looked for a key rack.

  She nearly missed the bunch of keys on the kitchen counter next to the sink, yet they seemed almost to have been left there for her to find. She snatched them up and dashed back to the cellar. She found Jørgensen waiting for her in the passage and tried two keys before the third slipped agreeably into the lock.

  * * *

  The reek of acetone was so powerful Louise instinctively covered her mouth with the sleeve of her coat. If anything, it was even more pungent than the smell of a dead body, she thought, tentatively stepping forward toward what appeared to be an oversize chest freezer.

  “It looks like some kind of lab down here,” Lars Jørgensen speculated, glancing around at the white tiles and the stainless steel table at the end.

  “The smell can’t have bothered him much,” Louise muttered, sensing the chemical grating in her nostrils and throat. She stood for a moment to steady her breathing as Jørgensen stepped forward and pulled on the handle of a door that turned out also to be locked.

  She tossed him the keys and studied the gurney that was parked in the passage, listening for any sound and desperately trying to dismiss the flow of images that ran through her mind from recent cases in which children and young women had been held captive for years on end.

  “Where the hell’s the light?” Lars Jørgensen said.

  He had unlocked and opened the door of a room that was completely dark. Louise heard him fumble for a switch.

  Then suddenly he exclaimed in fright, jumping back and almost screeching: “What the—?”

  Louise ventured forward with the small flashlight she had taken from her pocket.

  A second later she screamed.

  It wasn’t so much the shock of shining the light into the face of a dead woman as it was the fact that the woman was Jeanette Milling.

  “What is this?” she exclaimed, stunned by what she had seen.

  “I think I’ve found the switch,” Lars Jørgensen said behind her, and a second later the room was bathed in soft, sumptuous light.

  Louise stood entranced, unable to move. All she could do was stare at the naked female bodies.

  Lars Jørgensen found another switch and an almost theatrical system of spotlights drew all focus to the four corpses.

  “Who are the others?” he wondered.

  “A Norwegian and two Swedes,” Louise replied, thinking of Rønholt’s list of women who had disappeared from the same region as Jeanette.

  But the girl. There was no sign of the little girl.

  Louise wheeled around and ran back through the passage, past the big chest freezer, shouting for Jørgensen to bring the keys. They unlocked the final room and found it empty apart from a large stainless steel bath in the middle of the floor.

  Isabella wasn’t there. For a second Louise was thankful, though the feeling would not translate into relief.

  “Look at this,” Lars Jørgensen said, coming toward her with a dark wooden box in his hands.

  She had to get up close to see the four pairs of glass eyes inside. The other dedicated recesses in the box were empty. At one point there had seemingly been eight pairs together.

  Louise backed away. She needed to get outside and get some air. The feeling of being cooped up in a cellar with four dead bodies knotted her stomach.

  She had seen cases where a seemingly normal, stable family man had killed his wife and children one by one and left each in their own pool of blood. That was bad enough. But this was worse, she thought to herself, dashing around the side of the house to throw up. Maybe it was because she had yet to fully comprehend what it was she had seen.

  She paused for a moment to collect herself, then called Rønholt and gave him the address.

  * * *

  Louise rushed into Willumsen’s office as soon as they got back from Roskilde and told him what they had found in the attorney’s cellar. Cold air whipped in through the open window, and Willumsen himself sat ashen-faced behind his desk with reams of paper spread out in front of him.

  “Get the others in here,” he told her, holding her back for a moment to tell her a woman had called in saying she may have seen a girl fitting the description of Isabella Sachs-Smith.

  Louise was still in shock from having discovered the four women’s bodies but tried to push the thought aside and focus on the little girl.

  “The witness claims she saw the girl being forced into a large Mercedes in the parking area underneath the building where Carl Emil Sachs-Smith lived,” Willumsen explained after they were all gathered in his office.

  He had risen to his feet. For a second he seemed to drift away, closing his eyes and looking out of sorts. Then he went on:

  “She did not intervene, for fear of meddling in something that didn’t concern her.”

  “People these days,” Toft snorted with indignation.

  Willumsen gave a shrug and looked at Louise. “Time’s running out,” he said. “The negotiation unit was unfortunately unable to secure the girl’s release when they had the chance. Now we need to find out if she’s with Miklos Wedersøe. I want that girl back with her mother.”

  Louise looked down. It wasn’t Willumsen’s attitude as such that she found provoking; it was more because he never stopped. She tried to dismiss his humiliating criticism, but the fury she felt was also connected to the fact that the remark was merited: They had indeed failed.

  “I want a search out on Wedersøe’s car,” Willumsen commanded, raising his voice suddenly as if there were something he wished to impress on them. “I want every police district in the country out looking for him. Checks on all borders. Men on all ferries and bridges.”

  Then, abruptly, he clutched his chest and fell to the floor.

  39

  Why doesn’t Frederik just stay in your bed?” Markus had asked before he went off to school. “You don’t have to pretend he’s sleeping on the sofa, you know!”

  Camilla had been making his packed lunch when he came into the kitchen. Until now she had been doing her utmost to give the impression that Frederik Sachs-Smith was just a good friend who needed a place to stay while he was in Denmark. Apparently, though, her son was not quite as naive as she thought.

  She and Frederik had even set the alarm so they could get up ten minutes before she had to wake Markus. As they tumbled out of bed the heady scent of night-long sex still hung in the air of the bedroom and in th
e duvet they hurriedly bundled onto the sofa in the living room. She only hoped her thirteen-year-old son had not sussed that bit out, too.

  She shook her head and went to fetch her laptop but had difficulty concentrating. She kept seeing Carl Emil splayed out on the hotel bed before her eyes. She tried to delete the image from her mind and get to work on the article she was supposed to be writing for Morgenavisen.

  Although she was no longer a part of their crime desk she had offered them the story when Walther Sachs-Smith had called her shortly after landing at Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport and asked her to find a Danish newspaper that would publish the truth about the Angel of Death.

  “I’ve given the matter a great deal of consideration,” he told her, “and the time has come to tell the icon’s story. After all that’s happened, we can no longer keep it a secret. I want you to reveal how it came into the hands of my father and his family in Poland. I want people to know that we have never sought to conceal the artifact for reasons of greed, but simply because we did not wish to expose my father’s poor in-laws to any further harassment. I have lost my wife and now my son. I would like to do everything in my power to avoid anything happening to Isabella.”

  Camilla hadn’t the heart to say that it was perhaps too late. It was obvious to her that the man was crushed. She promised to pen the article and make sure everything came out.

  “I shall never forgive myself for my judgment having failed so fatally when I appointed Wedersøe to succeed our former attorney,” Walther Sachs-Smith had gone on to say, just as Camilla had thought the conversation to be over. “Things would have looked very different today if he had not been admitted into the family. The strife that has so blighted the company. His predecessor would never have turned my children against me for his own financial gain. I have been angry with my two youngest children, very angry indeed. Yet during these past few months I had looked forward to our one day being able to put all our disagreements behind us. Now I must live with the fact that I never had the chance to be reconciled with my son before he was so brutally taken away. I should not have asked him to take responsibility for the icon. I ought to have foreseen how badly it would all turn out. I’m so terribly sorry to have involved you in all of this.”