Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  “And then what?” Louise asked.

  “Then? Then nothing. I drove home once they’d gone in the front door. But it is totally repugnant that you can just go out and buy a woman like that.”

  Louise agreed with him wholeheartedly and looked up at the clock. They had an office lunch every Wednesday, and it was their team’s turn to provide the food this week, so she’d stopped by Hauen Bakery on her way in and filled her bike basket with Danish bread and rolls.

  “We’d better go put some coffee on,” she said, getting up.

  “Done,” Lars said. “I also tidied up the kitchen and emptied the dishwasher.”

  Louise sat down again. “What the hell’s up with you? Is something wrong at home?” she asked. Not that Lars usually shirked his share of kitchen duty, but they usually did the less-than-appealing clean-up together. Each team was responsible for making sure the lunchroom was clean and for running the dishwasher during their assigned week.

  “It’s nothing serious,” Lars said. “I just needed a little space from home.”

  He got up and retrieved the bread from her bike basket.

  “Let’s go in and hear what they have to say.”

  Louise got up and followed him, deciding not to pry any further into his home life at the moment. She was all too familiar with that feeling and respected him for taking the space he needed for himself.

  “I understand there’s news in the Skelbækgade case,” Suhr began, once everyone had helped themselves to bread and their coffee cups were full.

  He looked at Louise and Lars, who both nodded and explained the visit from Miloš Vituk. Lars added that afterwards he had driven by the witness’s address, followed him, and seen that he had the girl with him.

  Louise saw Willumsen furrow his brow, and it looked like he was going to say something, but Suhr beat him to it.

  “Interesting,” Suhr said. “We’ll have to run a check on the two Albanians. But maybe that’s already been initiated?”

  Willumsen shook his head and confessed that he had decided they should observe for a little longer before they put anything bigger in motion. But in the light of what Lars had seen, there was probable cause to believe there was something to the Serb’s story.

  “Let’s identify the two people we’re talking about—Arian and Hamdi—with their full names so we can get a court order and set up a wiretap,” Willumsen said, and asked Toft and Stig to take care of that.

  Suhr nodded and pulled a hand through his short gray hair before turning to look at Louise and Lars, asking whether they thought they ought to get a court order for Miloš Vituk also or if they believed his story.

  “We probably ought to, since he intentionally caused trouble for the two Albanians by putting them in our crosshairs,” Louise admitted, nodding as the possibility occurred to her. “But it seemed more like he came in because he was starting to fear that they were just going to keep raising their extortion price.”

  “First of all, we have to determine if any laws have actually been broken,” Willumsen said. “We all know how hard it can be to figure out if something is common procuring or if it is in actual fact a case of trafficking in women. Meanwhile, if the two Albanians might be connected to the murder in some way, then we’re interested in them.”

  His eyes wandered around the table and stopped on Stig, who signaled that he wanted to say something.

  “We have to keep the pressure on that whole scene and try to get someone to start to move,” Stig suggested.

  Louise followed him with her eyes as he tipped forward in his chair and started rapidly tapping his pen against the table, filling the room with loud clicking sounds. It was a bad habit he had that had bugged Louise for years. Now she looked away, forcing herself to ignore the pen.

  “And they say,” Stig continued, pausing for dramatic effect, “that the girls, the Eastern European ones, have to pay about 400 kroner a day. Someone cons them into thinking they own the street and the girls have to pay to work there.”

  He leaned back and tossed his pen onto the table.

  Louise sighed, glad that Mikkelsen wasn’t here to hear him. That would have sent his blood pressure through the roof.

  “We should keep that in mind,” Stig added, looking from Willumsen to Suhr. “Because if the same men are working with the trafficked girls, we ought to be able to spot them by keeping an eye on the money when it’s handed over. There must be a discernible pattern.”

  Louise couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. “It is absolutely true that someone has made a sham business of extorting money from the people on the bottom of the food chain on the street, but there are also quite a few Danish prostitutes who’ve figured out that there’s money to be earned that way, and they are demanding money from some of their fellow prostitutes. It’s turned into a regular business practice. Everyone’s cashing in on their struggle to make money,” she said, her eye trained on Stig’s pen, which was about to roll off the edge of the table.

  Stig flashed her an irritated look. He squinted his eyes a little and was about to respond, but Willumsen beat him to it and assigned the next task to Stig with a subtle gesture of his index finger.

  “That is exactly what I want you to check out. Set up surveillance on the area, and keep an eye on the girls. Don’t do anything. Just find out if there’s a pattern.”

  Louise glanced away to avoid the look she was sure Stig was giving her. What Willumsen was asking of him was going to require a lot of legwork, but she didn’t feel sorry for him. He’d brought it on himself.

  After the meeting, they milled about in the hallway outside Louise and Lars’s office.

  “Do we know anything about the two Albanian men already?” Toft asked, looking at Louise and her partner.

  They both shook their heads.

  “I’d be surprised if Mikkelsen couldn’t tell us who they are,” Toft said, offering to call his old friend. He and Mikkelsen had been partners for the brief period Mikkelsen worked as a plain-clothes officer keeping an eye out for disorderly conduct.

  “I’d really like to have a chat with Pavlína,” Louise said, looking at Lars, who concurred.

  Willumsen nodded and said, “Do that as quickly as possible. It’ll be interesting to hear her version.”

  “I’ll contact Miloš Vituk and set up a meeting,” Louise said. “And then I was thinking that we ought to do a round of all the brothels and massage parlors in the neighborhood and see if the woman might have worked in any of them.”

  Willumsen nodded at the suggestion before turning back to Stig.

  “We can certainly start putting pressure on the street scene, as you suggested,” Willumsen said, “but make sure it’s not too obvious, because then our folks will be way too easy to spot later if we seriously need to keep an eye on them.”

  Willumsen looked around at everyone again to make sure they understood he was serious. The bottom line was that they weren’t going to have an unlimited amount of manpower to call on if there happened to be a major break in the case.

  10

  CAMILLA FELT SAD AND EMPTY AS SHE SET HER BAG OF BEER bottles on the counter. She pulled one leg up under her as she removed the first lid and took a swig. Markus had gone to his dad’s house after school and was going to stay for the weekend, because it was his grandmother’s birthday and the whole family was staying at an inn. Camilla was planning to spend the rest of the day and evening enjoying all the beer she could drink while she sniffed around Skelbækgade and Halmtorvet and took a stroll up Istedgade. She changed from her skirt and high heels into jeans and rain boots. She wasn’t planning for this to be an investigative reporting trip. She was just curious to see what Copenhagen’s prostitution scene looked like at street level.

  She’d had yet another run-in with her editor. It had all started when Terkel Høyer arrived that morning by slamming his office door behind him. A minute later the phone on Camilla’s desk rang.

  He was yelling when he told her that the free alternative
paper had run a big interview with a woman—featuring her name and picture—who had come forward to say she had seen a young mother outside the church with a bundle in her arms. She also claimed she saw her open the door to the church and after a moment come back out empty-handed, disappearing down Stenhøj Allé.

  Høyer lowered his voice a little and asked her to come to his office.

  It turned out the article continued inside the paper, describing what the woman looked like in detail, with long blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. Not very old, maybe just a teenager. No, she hadn’t been with anyone, and she had gone quickly into the church and had come quickly back out. And no, the woman didn’t think she’d seen her before. So it couldn’t be someone who lived on the street, because she thought she’d recognize most of the women who lived along this section of the wide avenue in Frederiksberg, actually a separate city surrounded by Copenhagen on all sides. The witness stated that she even knew “the ones in the large mansion on the corner at the end of the street. Well, didn’t know them socially, that is,” she was quoted as saying, “just what they looked like.”

  Camilla threw the newspaper onto Høyer’s desk after skimming the story and asked before he could why they hadn’t scooped the story.

  “Don’t you wonder why she chose to take such an important witness statement to a free paper instead of telling the police what she saw?”

  Høyer twitched in his chair and spluttered angrily into her face that he couldn’t be bothered to wonder things like that because that wasn’t what sold real newspapers like theirs. She turned her back to him and returned to her office.

  First she called the Bellahøj precinct to find out if they knew about this witness and ask why they hadn’t mentioned it to her the day before when she spoke to them. The officer on duty claimed he hadn’t heard about any new witnesses. Then she called her own source, Rasmus Hem, who sounded sincere when he vehemently insisted he had never heard of the woman until reading her statement in the free paper. He flatly denied it was because they hadn’t been persistent enough looking for witnesses.

  “But we did bring her in for questioning this morning,” he hastened to add.

  Camilla decided to head over to the precinct to hear the woman’s explanation first hand and—as she had to admit—to steer clear of Høyer, who was still pissed off. Before she could leave the building, however, Camilla’s morning got even worse when the paper’s longtime photo editor suddenly appeared in her office doorway asking how the hell a journalism student from one of the smallest papers in the country had scooped them on this angle while Camilla kept claiming there was no new information to run about the case. Holck, as he was called, said she should know this was exactly the type of case that appealed to their readers: Children and dogs! That’s what sells papers! And then he took a few steps into her office, glaring at her the whole time, saying he was starting to doubt she could handle the story professionally since her own son was involved.

  What a day it had been. Camilla drank half of her beer in one gulp. It had been a long time since she’d sat on a bench drinking beer out of a bottle, and maybe it was a mistake, too, she thought as emptied it. But there was something that felt liberating and reckless about sitting out here alone without having to be accountable to anyone.

  She had lost it with Holck, yelling at him that first of all it most certainly was not a journalism student but an extremely well-paid, established journalist that that free paper had hired from Denmark’s premier newspaper, Berlingske Tidende, and second of all she was way fucking closer to the story than any of these other reporters because she had held that little baby in her arms. And she was not done making her point when Holck walked right over to her, leaned in over her desk, picked up her cell phone, and pointed to its camera lens.

  “Well, if you think you’re such a great damn journalist, then why didn’t you so much as snap one single measly picture of Baby Girl with your handy-dandy phone?” And she hadn’t been able to stop herself before she snatched the phone out of his hand and showed him the picture. He accused her of being disloyal to the paper, possessing poor judgment, and being incompetent—which was when she stormed out.

  But before she made it out of the building, she called Høyer and told him it was true. Then she recused herself and said she couldn’t cover the story since Markus was one of the witnesses. She said good-bye before he could respond, but she could hear Holck starting to rant in the background as she hung up.

  Camilla jumped slightly as a man sat down on the other end of the bench.

  After she had stormed out, she ended up heading out to the Bellahøj precinct anyway and had waited for three hours until she learned that there wasn’t anything to the woman’s statement. Officer Hem invited her to coffee and seemed tired as he explained that the reporter from the free paper had rung the witness’s doorbell right after the 9:00 TV news the night before. The witness had let the reporter in, a charming, attractive man who seemed polite and interested. Because the reporter was so disappointed when she said she hadn’t seen anything, without really intending to she told him she’d seen a young woman with a bundle in her arms. When he took her out for a stroll past the church, the words of her invented story just fell out, one after the other.

  “Are you sure she’s telling the truth now?” Camilla asked Hem.

  Hem nodded, adding that they were pretty sure the mother had not opened the church door as the witness claimed because the CSI techs had dusted the handle thoroughly for prints, and there were no fingerprints—not even smudged prints from someone wearing gloves—which meant someone had gone out of their way to remove them, certainly not the mother.

  Camilla had the feeling that the man who had sat at the other end of her bench was watching her, and for a second she felt the unease of trespassing into a world where she didn’t belong. But what the fuck. She had as much right as anyone to sit here on a public bench drinking a beer, even if this wasn’t her neighborhood.

  When she turned to look at him, she realized he wasn’t looking at her but at her bag of beer bottles. She smiled and offered him one.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking it. They sat together in silence watching the traffic and passersby.

  “That guy there is the Meat Meister,” the man said, raising his beer in the air in salute as a large Jaguar drove past them out of Kødbyen. The car returned his salute with a quick honk.

  The Jaguar was certainly opulent compared to the man beside her in his gabardine pants, which must have been fashionable at some point in the distant past but were now threadbare. His shirt collar curled up through his worn blue sweater, and he seemed generally old-fashioned and unkempt.

  Camilla turned toward him in curiosity. “How do you know the guy in the Jag?” she asked, pulling two more beers out of the bag.

  He gallantly offered to open them and stuck the lids in his pocket instead of tossing them on the ground as so many before them had obviously done.

  “I used to be one of his biggest customers. He was new back then and a little too expensive, but his product was better than anything else out there. So I had faith in him, and that laid the foundation for the business that has made him rich.”

  Suddenly Camilla thought back to the drug kingpin with whom she herself had crossed paths—Klaus West trafficked a drug known on the streets as “green dust.” He might also have been driving around in a Jaguar if he hadn’t wound up behind bars.

  “Nice car,” Camilla said, watching it as it disappeared.

  The man was lost in thought for a bit, but then he finished his beer and mumbled: “That was some fucking good meat. We drove a van with forty servings of tournedos Rossini with foie gras, truffles, and everything else down to the French Riviera for a big fête for Roger Vergé himself. Oh, the Moulin de Mougins!”

  Suddenly then man turned to look at Camilla and his eyes seemed present again.

  “What a chef,” he said, waiting to see if she had any idea who he was talking about. “I’m talking
about Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, they were all there. But that night the Gastronomic Academy of Denmark was honoring Roger Vergé because his new cookbook had just been released in Danish. They even awarded him some sort of honorary degree.”

  The man reached over and pulled another beer out of Camilla’s bag. Again she could see that his mind was lost in the past.

  “Monsieur Vergé came down to the kitchen afterward and admitted that he’d never had such good meat before.”

  He took a practiced swig of his beer.

  “There’s a picture of the two of us together,” he remembered smiling.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Camilla spotted two men talking to a young woman. She was fairly sure one of the men was Detective Michael Stig from Louise’s squad, and standing a little farther over toward Halmtorvet she recognized two more police officers.

  The man next to her kept talking and drinking her beer while she kept her eyes trained on the street. She could see a fair number of people on Sønder Boulevard from her vantage point with practically the whole of Kødbyen in front of her, and she had a good view up Skelbækgade. Istedgade ran parallel behind her, and Halmtorvet was to her left.

  A car stopped and quickly picked up a girl before disappearing again. Camilla didn’t stop watching until she noticed that the man next to her was holding out his hand.

  “I’m Kaj,” he said, introducing himself, his hand wrapping around hers in a firm handshake.

  “Camilla,” she said with a sigh when he asked what she did. “I’m a reporter,” she said. “And right now I’m so sick of it that I just might start making food or selling meat and getting rich myself.”

  Kaj pulled out another beer. This time he passed it over to Camilla without taking one for himself.

  “That’s not something you just do,” he said with a sudden seriousness, turning toward her. “That’s something you need a knack for. Like anything else you want to be good at. You need a knack for it, and skill. And then you need to put your heart into it. There are far too many young chefs out there who think it’s just a matter of getting your name out there.”