Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  The pastor nodded at her story.

  “We’ll never fully understand the kind of trauma something like that marks a person with,” he said. “I have a lot of good memories, too. Of really bonding with people, and helping people create new lives, even though their minds and bodies definitely bore the scars. Small Muslim children would come in by night, rescued from Serbian areas where their families had been exterminated—but inexplicably the children had escaped.”

  Henrik paused, lost in thought, and Camilla watched the subtle expressions flicker across his face as he relived the memories.

  “One Serb came by several times, always after dark, after most people were in bed.”

  The pastor absentmindedly tore the shopping list into small strips, his eyes following the motions of his fingers.

  “He knew no one would take care of a Muslim baby in a Serbian zone, so he brought the baby to us at great peril to himself should anyone have caught him.”

  Henrik looked up.

  “So there were inspirational stories, too,” he added, pushing aside the memories as he brushed the little pieces of ripped paper into a small pile. “But it was definitely an experience I’ll always remember. Even though I see a very intimate side of people and their lives in my everyday work here, my time in Srebrenica left an indelible impression on me.”

  “Didn’t it help, doing the work with your wife? A shared experience?”

  Henrik nodded.

  “Definitely. And we had Jonas while we were there,” he said, trying to brighten his voice and discard the gloominess.

  Now it was Camilla’s turn to nod.

  “But then Alice died, and Jonas and I were on our own. I may have been a bit naïve, but I tried to create a home life for my son and me where our relationship is as close as possible—so he won’t suffer so much from growing up without his mother. Of course, I know that I can never make up for her absence,” he said with a wry little laugh, and then a moment of silence before he spoke again.

  “Neither my wife nor I had any family left, so it’s just Jonas and me.”

  He hesitated a little before continuing.

  “I suppose that’s also why the idea of a housekeeper seems so alien to me. There’s no room for a stranger in the life Jonas and I have together.”

  Camilla understood what he meant. But at the same time she felt sorry for him because it would probably prevent him from ever falling in love again.

  “Do you think the service could be Thursday or Friday? Or should we wait until the weekend?” she asked, turning the conversation back to Kaj’s funeral.

  “That depends on when the police will release the body,” Henrik responded. Camilla ran her hand over her hair, resting her face in her hands for a second.

  “Right,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see what they say.”

  “Can we have some ice cream?”

  The boys startled her, stealthfully coming down into the kitchen.

  She watched Henrik ruffle his son’s hair as he nodded at the freezer. She warned Markus that they ought to be getting home.

  “We can leave as soon as we’re done with the ice cream,” he said, and she nodded obligingly. She held out her cup when Henrik offered her more coffee, knowing it would keep her up all night. At least that way, the thoughts and guilt that had kept her on the brink of sleep for the past two nights wouldn’t haunt her tonight.

  “Call me after you talk to the police. Do you have my cell number?” Henrik asked.

  She reached for the scraps of the shopping list and wrote his number down on a free corner, thanking him for the coffee and especially the conversation.

  21

  “SUCK AND FUCK, FIVE HUNDRED KRONER!”

  Lars played the recording back for Louise on the video camera’s tiny screen.

  It was 10:15, and Mikkelsen had just called Louise’s cell to let her know he was on his way over as well.

  Lars explained that he began his tour by walking down Istedgade, then continued onto the surrounding streets, and finally headed over on Skelbækgade, where he’d gone up to Dybbølsbro Station and back, before calling Louise and telling her he was ready to meet up at Central Station.

  She grabbed another chair and pulled it over to their high table outside the only snack kiosk still open that late, just as Mikkelsen walked up with his hands in his pockets and his leather jacket open, revealing a bright red shirt that lit up the sleepy train station.

  Mikkelsen laughed when he listened to the recording. “How could you resist such an appealing offer?”

  Lars blushed, and Louise smiled.

  “Nah, but a guy who works with my wife did walk by while I was talking to one of the women—so there may be some conversation over the water cooler at my wife’s company tomorrow,” Lars said, not looking particularly worried.

  “What was he doing in that neighborhood?”

  Louise briefly considered the possibility that Lars’s wife might think her husband had been seeking comfort from a prostitute because they were having trouble at home.

  “Oh, he had just come out of one of the restaurants.”

  She nodded. She, too, had been struck by the strange mix of crowds created as Copenhagen’s red-light district had turned trendy in recent years, and there were a number of destination restaurants and cafés there now that drew in a whole new clientele compared to the people on the margins of life who lived there.

  “How many of the women do you think were Czech?” Mikkelsen asked.

  “A good few,” Lars replied before pausing a moment and then admitting that he had a hard time telling exactly which country the Eastern European women were from. “You can tell which ones are from Africa just by looking at them, and you can hear which ones are from Denmark by listening to them. But I really couldn’t tell you if a woman was from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, or Romania for that matter. Maybe Igli can help us narrow it down if he looks at the tapes?”

  Mikkelsen nodded and said he got the impression a lot of them were Czech, actually. “Although we have taken a bunch of Czech women into custody lately in raids, and then they stay scarce on the street for a while after that. Of course, they come pouring right back in again soon enough.”

  Lars grabbed one of the kiosk’s few laminated menus and decided on two Danish-style hot dogs. Mikkelsen got a Polish sausage in a bun, while Louise opted for the croque-monsieur. After they paid, Louise told them that an elderly lady who lived on Istedgade across from Club Intim had been nice enough to let her sit in her living room for the last two hours of her stakeout on the club.

  “I saw Arian in the dark Audi. He drove up a little after eight and parked farther down the street,” Louise reported. “And Hamdi was working. He walked up and down the stretch of sidewalk in front of Club Intim with an armful of dark red roses that he was trying to sell to passing drivers. He apparently supplements his income that way.”

  She looked at Mikkelsen to see if this was something he already knew.

  Her colleague ran a hand over his stubble, a smile lighting up his face.

  “Well, you may be giving him a bit too much credit,” he said and then grew serious again. “The roses are just an excuse. When he walks around like that, he’s really just keeping his eye on the women. If he doesn’t think they’re doing enough, he goes after them.”

  One of Louise’s eyebrows shot up as she nodded thoughtfully. Of course, she thought, suddenly remembering of an old case from southern Jutland where several foreign pimps had assigned their women numbers and ranked them by earnings, how much they brought in per hour and how much per day. The information was useful when they later sold the women—maybe that’s why they kept such a close watch, Louise thought. They needed a way to estimate productivity and keep track of each woman’s value. Someone at The Nest had explained how harsh the punishment was if the women didn’t live up to what was expected of them. God, it must cause tremendous stress to have their pimps’ eyes on them all the time like that, she thou
ght.

  “I saw Pavlína,” Louise said after her partner set their food and drinks on the table in front of them. “She was walking with the girl she and Miloš picked up at the airport, but I didn’t have a chance to ask if she is her sister.”

  Mikkelsen reported that he’d stopped in at the basement grocery and chatted with his other informants.

  “People are worried,” he said and explained that he’d heard from a number of sources that there were more new girls. “They’ve been reorganized a little, and the fee they have to pay to use the street has gone up.”

  “How the hell can they raise the price?” Louise exclaimed, accepting the cup of coffee Lars handed her.

  “It happens any time there are suddenly a lot of women walking the street. Someone will offer to keep the sidewalk ‘clean’ for the prostitutes who pay. Then the neighborhood gets divided up into zones where some areas are more attractive than others.”

  “I don’t get why the women go along with this,” Lars interrupted, looking at Mikkelsen.

  “Yeah, I know,” Mikkelsen agreed. “But if you think about the long lines of women standing along the old rural highways out by the border between the Czech Republic and Austria, and then they find out that they could be earning a lot more if they just went to Copenhagen, well then maybe it’s not so strange. I mean, don’t forget, quite a few of the women are here of their own free will because they can make a lot more money here than where they come from. They’re not just here because greedy men have forced them up here with violence,” Mikkelsen added. “The percentage of prostitutes who are victims of human trafficking is surprisingly quite small.”

  Louise nodded but argued that human trafficking would increase if the police didn’t start coming down harder on the traffickers.

  “True enough,” Mikkelsen said. “But as long as we have a minister of justice with no compassion for these women, it’ll be damn hard to prevent. If she ever mentions the police stepping up their efforts against trafficking in women, I suspect it will have more to do with political strategy than her really wanting to fix the problem.”

  Mikkelsen smiled sarcastically.

  “If she can go to the press and say that she’s increasing the sentences for violent crimes, that will do her some real good. That’s the kind of thing that gets you votes,” Mikkelsen continued, snapping Louise out of her reverie. “Not prostitutes.”

  “Well, we certainly can’t praise our own higher-ups for being particularly committed to the cause either,” Louise pointed out. Lars immediately backed her up on that.

  “Until we put more resources into cleaning up the pimps and traffickers, they can pretty much continue to operate with impunity,” Lars said.

  “Except, of course, when they start murdering people,” Louise added as she finished her coffee.

  Mikkelsen nodded and stood up.

  “I’ll meet you guys here in the morning and we can see what’s going on,” he said and yawned. “Should we say around nine?” he suggested, looking at Louise.

  “It’s a date,” she said, and then she and Lars strolled down the length of the train station’s main concourse out to the bus stop while Mikkelsen headed for the rear exit.

  22

  THE NEXT MORNING LARS CALLED LOUISE’S CELL JUST BEFORE TEN to report that Arian had just left his apartment. He hadn’t taken the Audi and was instead walking toward the Valby train station.

  “I’m at Central Station now,” Louise said. She’d been standing in the bookstore, but had stepped out when her phone rang.

  “I’ll call you again when we get close, so you’ll be ready,” Lars said.

  “Sounds good.”

  Morning rush hour was over. The people in the station were more relaxed now, taking time to stop and study the departure screens before heading down to the various platforms. Mikkelsen had gone to get himself a cup of coffee and a croissant, and Louise was studying the bookstore’s sale table, browsing through the books from one end to the other. Some caught her interest, others she rejected just for their covers. After Lars called back to say Arian and he were on the light rail B line heading toward Holte, Louise found Mikkelsen and told him that Arian would arrive about 10:27.

  That was three minutes away, and Mikkelsen nodded toward a woman with short, blonde hair.

  “I think she’s the first one,” he said softly. “It looks like she’s hanging around, waiting, and I don’t think it’s for a train.”

  The woman sat down on the very edge of the bench in front of the Danish National Railways’ ticket window. She looked at her watch and clutched her little purse tightly under her arm.

  Arian ambled up from the platform below with his hands in his pockets and his hair slicked back. As he passed the woman, she got up and quickly slipped him something. The next second she was gone. They didn’t exchange a word.

  Lars was still over by the escalators, while Mikkelsen had pulled back in case Arian recognized him. Although they’d never had anything to do with each other, people talked, and a lot of people in the prostitution world knew the officers from the local police station. Louise walked over and sat down on the bench. She set her purse in her lap and slowly opened a newspaper in front of her.

  She watched the Albanian buy a cup of coffee and a roll. After that, he sat down at the table Mikkelsen had just left, and started flipping through one of the free newspapers Mikkelsen had left behind.

  Then they came, one at a time. Handing him their money and leaving. It looked like friends happening to bump into each other. A short greeting, and then the women moved on. Arian only took a couple of bites of his food, and Louise had the sense he was dragging it out, killing time like every other person who was waiting for the next train.

  A young woman approached him hesitantly, her eyes trained on the floor. Every once in a while she raised her face and glanced at him fleetingly, while everything about her body language suggested she did not want to walk over to him.

  Louise instinctively knew that Arian had seen the woman, even though his eyes were still focused on his newspaper. When she finally made it up to his café table, Louise watched her lips forming the words while she gestured in despair with her arms. Louise also saw how quickly Arian was up out of his chair and how aggressively he pulled the woman to him so they were standing face to face. He leaned in threateningly as he chewed her out.

  Several people walking by saw the incident, but quickly looked away, opting to hurry on toward their destinations.

  Just then someone came running toward Arian and the woman. Louise saw Mikkelsen step forward as Lars approached from the escalators.

  Hamdi brutally pushed the woman away and pulled Arian aside as he angrily and nervously delivered a message. Whatever he said drove the men to leave, running toward the station’s rear exit and then down the stairs toward Reventlowsgade.

  Lars followed them, and Mikkelsen walked over to the young woman, who had sat down, shaken.

  Louise guessed Mikkelsen asked her if she was all right because the woman quickly nodded, brushed aside his expression of concern, and hurried off.

  There were two options, and Louise wavered between keeping an eye on the young woman and following her partner. But when Mikkelsen started to head for the escalator, Louise decided to stay, watching the woman’s nervous looks and frightened expression.

  It took a little while before Louise realized her cell phone was ringing in her purse, and by the time she noticed it she was afraid it was too late.

  But Willumsen’s voice was clear and precise, and he didn’t waste any time on hellos.

  “A German tourist just pulled a young foreign woman out of Copenhagen Harbor, alive,” Willumsen reported succinctly. “I want you to go down to National Hospital right away and talk to her. The tourist spotted her while he was pulled over figuring out where he was on his map.”

  “Do we know anything about what happened?” Louise asked.

  “She was lying in the water with both hands tied behind her b
ack, and a pouch hanging under her shirt against her stomach contained a Czech passport listing her name as Hana Simrová, born in 1990. There was also some cash. We’re trying to get the female interpreter in right now, the one we used with Pavlína. We’ll send her straight to the hospital when we get hold of her. Toft and Stig are on their way down to the harbor; their tracker shows that ‘our’ Audi A4 left the Albanian’s Valby address at 10:13 A.M. and, strangely enough, was at on Kalvebod Wharf on Copenhagen Harbor only half an hour ago,” Willumsen said.

  “Wow, that’s quite brazen, throwing her into the water in broad daylight,” Louise commented once he’d finished. “I’m sure you won’t be surprised that the Audi showed up at Central Station less than ten minutes ago. At least, Hamdi came running in and got Arian.”

  Louise stood up and asked if he’d reserved patrol cars for the detectives so she could head straight to the motor pool, or if she had to go upstairs and sign a car out first.

  “Just go straight there. I’ll make sure there’s a car waiting for you.”

  From the sidewalk out front she called Lars to update him on Willumsen’s information.

  “I’m on my way to National Hospital now, but I’d really like to know what the wiretap picks up for the next couple hours,” Louise said as she crossed Bernstoffsgade and continued past Tivoli toward the police parking garage.

  23

  AYOUNG WOMAN, PALE AND WRAPPED IN A LARGE BATHROBE, was sitting on a chair in the examining room. She had a towel wrapped around her hair so her face was exposed only from eyes to chin, where she had pulled up the bathrobe like a collar. She was holding a plastic mug of hot chocolate, and her eyes wandered a little as Louise held out her hand and introduced herself.

  The interpreter wasn’t there yet, so Louise tried English and asked if the woman understood.

  “A little,” she replied, eyeing Louise uncertainly before confirming that her name was Hana Simrová.