by Sara Blaedel
He spoke quickly, concentrating, clearly trying to remember all the details.
“She wanted me to drive her somewhere where they couldn’t keep their eye on her.”
Louise refrained from interrupting, but jotted who? on her notepad.
“My car was parked on Valdemarsgade, so we drove out toward the fish market, down that street that runs to the Sjælland Bridge and out to that big parking lot at Bella Center. The whole way there, she just sat there crying.”
“Did she tell you what she wanted?” Louise asked when the man paused.
“Yes, she said she was being forced to work as a prostitute and was desperate to buy her way out so she could go home.”
“What was her name?”
“Pavlína Branková. She was twenty-two and came from Ústí nad Labem in the Czech Republic. She said she was working as a prostitute against her will. They forced her with violence and threats, and she showed me some of the marks on her arms and the back of her neck from their beatings.”
Louise wrote their this time.
“And now she’s been murdered,” Lars stated, pushing his cup of cold coffee away.
Miloš Vituk quickly shook his head.
“No, God almighty!” he exclaimed, and held up his hands as if to ward off bad news. So Louise asked him to explain what the connection was between Pavlína and the crime on Skelbækgade. Instead of answering, he started explaining the rest of what she’d told him out in the Bella Center parking lot.
“Pavlína never knew her parents and grew up in an orphanage with her sister, who’s two years younger. When she turned sixteen, she was too old to stay in the orphanage, and she’s been on the streets since then. Her sister followed her two years later, and they got by on their own until Pavlína was forced into the back seat of a car late one night and brought to Copenhagen.”
“Who forced her?” Lars interrupted, trying to get a sense of whom Miloš was accusing of kidnapping the woman.
“Arian and Hamdi, both Albanians,” Miloš said curtly and explained that there had been two other girls from the Czech Republic in the car to Copenhagen, but Pavlína hadn’t known either of them before.
“The man in the front seat didn’t want them talking to each other. She doesn’t remember much from the ride, but that’s probably because they were drugged most of the way.”
Now Louise was starting to wonder what Miloš’s role in this story was, since he’d decided to come to the police. So she asked if he was still in touch with Pavlína.
He nodded and then stopped to think for a moment, as if considering how much he ought to tell her.
“I met her a few times,” he said, and then added that that was only when she’d been able to slip away without being discovered. “She was under surveillance most of the time, at the hotel where they put her up with another girl, and whenever she was sent out onto the street. I said I wanted to help her, but didn’t know what I should do. She said that she was under a lot of pressure because she couldn’t earn as much as they demanded. She was paying for her room and board and for permission to use the street. At that point she was about to collapse under the pressure, and I got the sense that that was her handlers’ intention, to push her to the limit, to a point where she no longer had the energy to put up any resistance. One night I met her in front of Café Yrsa. In tears she begged me to help her find the money to buy her freedom, and she promised to pay it all back.”
There was a pause that made the mood in the office feel somber, and each of them sat lost in their own thoughts until Louise broke the silence.
“Do you have any sense of why she decided to stop you that first time on the street?”
Miloš Vituk shook his head slightly, as if that question had been bothering him for a while but he couldn’t come up with an answer for it.
“Maybe there just wasn’t anyone else around right then as she was reaching the breaking point,” he finally said, clearing his throat so his voice sounded more solid. “I don’t believe in coincidences. People usually meet each other for a reason. That’s also why I wanted to help her.”
Louise studied him for a moment. He seemed a little naïve, she thought, but at the same time he was at least being honest.
“I told her to find out how much they wanted to let her go, and so we met again a few days later. They were demanding 50,000 kroner to release her. I didn’t have that much, but I agreed to meet them at a bar on Victoriagade and we negotiated that I could have her for 15,000 kroner.”
“That’s a fair amount, considering that you didn’t know much about her and only had her word that she’d pay you back,” Louise interjected.
At the same, time it was a shockingly small amount to pay for a woman, but Mikkelsen had told them the night before that you could buy a foreign woman for a thousand Euros. That was less than Louise paid for her mortgage every month.
Miloš nodded and shrugged. “I was starting to grow fond of her,” he admitted. “So I paid the money and she moved into my apartment.”
“Is she still working as a prostitute?” Louise wanted to know.
He shook his head vehemently and said they were dating now. “She wanted to go back to the Czech Republic to find her little sister and tell her about me. Everything happened so quickly the night she was abducted. Her sister didn’t even know where she was,” he reminded them, and then explained that Pavlína had taken a bus to Prague on March 10th, and from there she had continued by train to Ústí nad Labem.
“And?” Louise prompted, waiting for Miloš to continue. “Weren’t you worried that you would never see her again, after you’d paid all that money?”
He smiled and shook his head. “We talked to each other every day. But two weeks ago she called me one night crying and yelling that they’d found her. One of Arian’s contacts was following her, and she didn’t dare go outside. She was afraid that they might take her sister this time if they saw the two of them together. She wanted me to come get her, and I did.”
Miloš seemed to deflate a little, preoccupied by his own account, and then he was overcome with a rage that made his voice rise.
“Last week she disappeared from my apartment. I’d been out the whole day,” he said. His voice suddenly sounded tired, and he took a deep breath before continuing. “When I got home, she was gone. Then later that night I got a brief call from her. She was sobbing and asked me to pay 80,000 kroner. She said they were going to send her back out onto the streets to earn the money if she couldn’t come up with it, and they threatened to cut her throat if she tried to run away.”
Finally, Louise thought, an indication of how this related to the case, just as she had been starting to think they would never get there. But considering that they didn’t have any other leads, she realized that Miloš Vituk might be the best chance they had at solving the case.
Lars asked Miloš what had happened after he’d left Pavlína in his apartment and Louise could picture the whole thing as Miloš explained how they’d tricked the young woman into opening the door and then forced her to go down to the Albanian club on Saxogade, where they locked her up in a little room in back after punching her several times.
“After I explained that I didn’t have that much money, I spent the next few nights driving around looking for her. I thought that if I found her maybe we could talk our way out of the situation. The third night, I spotted her down in front of the conference center, but at first she refused to even talk to me. They’d told her that I refused to help her again and that I was responsible for her being sent back out onto the street.”
“As far as I know, slavery was abolished two hundred years ago,” Lars interjected dryly.
Miloš shrugged.
“Some people say there have never been as many slaves as there are today,” Louise said, and then asked if Miloš had heard from the two Albanians again.
“They ambushed me down on Istedgade later that same night. They knew I’d talked to her and now they were demanding 100,000 krone
r, but in return they promised that that would be their last demand for her. But they keep women like slaves, abuse them, and extort money from anyone who tries to help them, so I don’t believe them,” he concluded.
Well, you’re certainly wise not to, Louise thought. She sat for a moment, letting the story sink in. It wasn’t news to her that women were being bought and sold in Copenhagen, but realistically you couldn’t do as much about it as you might think. The few cases they’d seen had been hard to clear up, because the women were typically only in Denmark for the three months they were legally allowed to stay without a residence permit and then they were off again, usually shipped on to some other country. And Louise had no doubt that most of the girls had been coerced into saying they were doing it voluntarily.
“I had just been in touch with someone who was going to help me get the money, so I said I would pay, but then this morning they sent me a message that the price had gone up to 120,000 kroner because it had taken me so long to show any interest.”
“Does this have anything to do with the woman we found on Skelbækgade?” Louise asked, eyeing him earnestly.
He hesitated a bit before responding that of course he couldn’t say for sure, but the threats the Albanians had made regarding Pavlína sounded the same as what had happened to the victim.
“And now you’re asking us to catch these two men, Arian and Hamdi?” Lars concluded.
Miloš nodded and looked uncertain for the first time, as if he’d just sicced some pit bulls on a couple of little boys.
“How do we find them?” Louise asked. “And what are you planning to do?”
“I’m not sure. You might be able to find them at the club on Saxogade. I guess for me, I’ve decided to trust that they’ll let her go this time, so I’ll pay what they’re asking,” he said. “But I’ve told them that she has to be there when I arrive, otherwise I won’t pay. And I have to get her before they can have the money.”
“When?” Lars asked.
“Tonight at 6 P.M.,” he replied.
“What do the two Albanians look like?” Louise asked.
“Arian has shoulder-length hair,” Miloš said, gesturing with his hands that it came down just below his shoulders, “and he wears glasses. Hamdi has short hair and is short and thin.”
A slight smile crossed Lars’s lips as he jotted down the descriptions. Half the people they encountered on Istedgade would match them.
“We’re going to have to talk to Pavlína as well and find out if maybe she knows anything about the woman who was killed, and we’ll need her help if we’re going to try to put a stop to those two and their trade in Czech women,” Louise said.
“Of course,” Miloš said, “but I think she’d prefer to be free to come in on her own.”
“We could meet in the parking lot at Bella Center, where the two of you went that time, if that would make her feel safer,” Lars suggested.
Miloš nodded and promised to get back to them once he’d paid the money and she was hopefully back home again.
He didn’t say anything as Louise escorted him back downstairs, but when they parted he thanked her for taking on the case and helping him so the Albanians couldn’t continue with their outrageous extortion.
Willumsen was standing in their office when she got back upstairs. Lars had filled him in about their visitor and was just explaining how the Albanians had kidnapped Pavlína and sent her back out onto the street after Miloš paid for her freedom.
“Shouldn’t we move in as he hands over the money?” Louise asked, eyeing Willumsen.
Toft stopped on his way down the hall and leaned against the doorframe to listen in. He had one of those plastic nicotine inhalers in his mouth that he always used, a sorry substitute for the cigarettes he used to smoke until the ban on indoor smoking went into effect at police HQ. In the beginning Louise thought they were to help him quit smoking, but as time went by she realized they had nothing to do with smoking cessation. Her colleague had simply replaced his cigarettes with the nicotine from the inhaler so he wouldn’t have to keep running outside every time he wanted to smoke.
Willumsen stroked his chin, lost in thought.
“So he thinks the two Albanians might have some connection to the woman we found? I don’t think there’s enough here for us to get involved yet,” Willumsen decided. “Instead, let’s try to figure out what’s going on and how big a network we’re talking about. Try to get a sense of the organization the Albanians are part of so we’re sure we wrap up the whole syndicate when we do strike.”
“Where was the girl living until the Serb bought her and she moved in with him?” Toft asked, stuffing his hands into the angled front pockets of his corduroy pants and looking at Louise.
“At one of the cheap hotels on one of the side streets off Istedgade,” she replied.
“Maybe we should do a round of the hotels in the area with a picture of our murdered woman and find out if anyone knew her?” Toft suggested.
Willumsen nodded to him. “Do that. If that doesn’t give us any leads, we’ll go back again after Rick and Jørgensen have talked to the Czech woman. Surely she can show us where she was staying,” he added.
“If she can recognize it. You hear about how these women are kept on such a short leash they never see anything other than the inside of the room they’re kept locked in and the stretch of street where they earn money,” Toft interjected.
“We could also take a look at the Albanian club,” Lars suggested, but Willumsen waved off the idea.
“For now let’s focus our attention on the Skelbækgade woman,” he decided. “Once we get through with that, you can look into this other situation.”
He lowered his hand again.
“I’m not ruling out a possible connection between the two. But I want to know who the dead woman is first, and until we have a name we’re not going to get very far.”
And with that Willumsen adjourned the meeting and disappeared.
7
CAMILLA HAD SPENT MOST OF THE DAY FOLLOWING UP ON HER story about the baby abandoned in the church, even though she didn’t make it into her office until after eleven.
Markus had woken up several times overnight with terrifying nightmares about her abandoning him and never coming back, and Camilla had no idea what time he had stumbled into her room with his blanket under his arm, sobbing. He lay down beside her, and she stroked his hair until he settled down again.
“If we’d left for school earlier, we might have seen the mother,” Markus said while they were eating breakfast. “And then we could have stopped it from happening.”
Camilla had tried to explain to him that there were many reasons why a mother might choose to leave her child.
“Maybe she did it for the sake of the child, because she knew she would never be able to give the little girl the life she thought the child ought to have. And that she would be better off if she were adopted by someone else.”
Camilla could see from Markus’s expression that he didn’t understand how it could be better for the little girl to wind up with strangers instead of her birth mother.
“You do know that it’s very hard for a grown-up to be accepted as a foster parent—let alone an adoptive parent—don’t you?” Camilla asked him. “You have to be approved so everyone is sure that you’re suited to taking care of a child. And that you’ll make sure the child has a loving, secure place to grow up in. It’s a big responsibility. Maybe this was the best thing that could happen to that little girl if her own mother couldn’t handle the responsibility.”
Camilla hoped she sounded convincing enough that it would put the worst of her son’s fears to rest.
They sat at the breakfast table for a long time, but finally she got up and cleared the Nutella and cardamom rolls away and put the butter back in the fridge. Then she called the pastor to ask if he and Jonas wanted to come over for dinner so the boys could talk a little more about what they’d been through. She explained that the previous day’s exp
eriences had made quite an impression on Markus, and it turned out that Pastor Holm had decided to keep Jonas home from school for the same reason. He invited Camilla and Markus to come over to his place for dinner. When he said that Markus was welcome to come over right away if he wanted, Camilla decided to let her son play hooky with his buddy.
They cycled over to the pastor’s residence together. Camilla put Markus’s laptop with World of Warcraft in the basket on the front of her bike and followed him on the bike path. When they reached the church, she walked out back to the attached pastor’s residence with Markus and knocked twice with the heavy door knocker before kissing him on both cheeks and promising that she would try to finish work at a reasonable hour. She smiled at Markus’s friend when he yanked open the door and dragged Markus inside so they could start playing. She could see the pastor sitting at his computer in the living room and waved to him before shutting the door again and pushing her bike back down the drive to head to Morgenavisen.
When she called Frederiksberg Hospital, Camilla learned that the baby girl was still in the hospital and the doctor thought the infant would be there for a week or two until she was sent on to Skodsborg Orphanage.
“Unless the mother turns up,” he added.
Then she called the social services office and spoke to a woman who was also really hoping the mother would come forward. She made it clear that they would be lenient on a woman who had left her child that way. She didn’t need to be afraid of prosecution, because what was important now was looking toward the future, and they would offer her whatever help she might need.
“If the mother comes forward now, will she be allowed to take the child home with her?” Camilla asked when she finally got ahold of a social worker who could advise her how the system usually worked.
