Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  “But who decides to give birth outside the system, without a doctor or a midwife or anything?” Camilla wondered out loud to herself.

  They were interrupted by the sharp ring of the doorbell, and the pastor stood up to go let the police in and accompany them over to the church.

  Exactly. Who does decide to give birth completely alone? Louise thought. She hadn’t heard anyone coming up the kitchen steps, so she jumped a little when there was a hard knock on the door.

  It was the sexton, who stuck his gray-haired head in while the rest of him stayed out on the stoop.

  “Someone is here for the funeral and insists on knowing why it’s been postponed,” he announced. “He says he’s from the police, but he doesn’t have his badge.”

  Louise got up and went out to fill Mikkelsen in on what had happened. Two police cars had just pulled up in the courtyard next to the church, almost as if they felt at home there. Louise heard one officer yell to another that the techs would be there within five minutes.

  Mikkelsen was wearing dark trousers and a dark suit jacket, which was a little tight around the gut. She could tell he wasn’t comfortable, not in the clothes and not with the situation, and his eyebrows shot up like two seagull wings when he spotted her.

  “Oh, right, your friend,” he said when Louise reached him.

  Louise nodded and explained that the funeral had been canceled because Camilla had found a dead baby when she arrived to decorate the church for the funeral.

  Mikkelsen nodded without interrupting as Louise explained what had happened, and every time she finished a sentence, he nodded as if she were filing a report. Something about his posture told Louise that it had been a struggle just for him to show up. A lot of people had trouble with funerals, but in his case it probably had more to do with how involved he was with the Istedgade neighborhood beat. It was rare for a death to happen in such a brutal fashion as the former chef’s, and Mikkelsen wasn’t hiding the fact that he feared this was something they were going to be seeing more of. No other funeral guests had arrived, not that Louise had been expecting any.

  They stepped out of the way as the crime-scene investigators arrived and pulled their car in, and Louise nodded at Frandsen as he and his people started taking out their equipment.

  Mikkelsen, who was from the downtown precinct, looked at his watch.

  “I suppose I might as well head home and have a little breakfast,” he said, and Louise walked him out to the parking lot, but stopped when Rasmus Hem from the Bellahøj precinct walked over and introduced himself before asking to see Camilla.

  “She’s in the kitchen,” Louise replied, and then said good-bye to Mikkelsen so she could accompany Rasmus in.

  Camilla was still sitting right where Louise had left her, and she just nodded when Rasmus greeted her.

  “So you’re the one who found him,” Rasmus stated, and Camilla nodded again. When he didn’t ask anything else and just sat down across from her, she started to explain on her own.

  “I went into the church with some flowers for the funeral, and when I was on my way out again, I tripped,” she explained in a voice that sounded mechanical.

  “Did you see what had caused you to fall?” Officer Hem wanted to know, before he asked if she had done anything else inside the entrance of the church besides set down the flowers.

  Camilla shook her head and said no to both.

  “I’m probably the only one who touched anything,” Louise interjected, showing how she had moved the bundle before taking hold of the corners to unwrap the towel. “Besides Camilla, the only people who have been in the church since the baby was found were the pastor and myself.”

  Behind her, Louise heard Henrik coming down the stairs from the second floor. He’d brought Jonas a soda and a bowl of popcorn.

  “He’s reading Harry Potter,” Henrik said when Louise asked how he was doing. “But it would be nice if we could avoid any more dramatic events,” he said in a forced, upbeat tone. “People are going to end up being afraid to come to church for fear of finding an abandoned baby on the floor.”

  Officer Hem smiled at him and agreed that things couldn’t continue like this.

  “Would it be all right if I just sat off on the side and did a little work on my computer?” Henrik asked, asking Officer Hem for permission. “I have a column I need to finish writing for tomorrow, and I haven’t quite decided yet how I’m going to approach the piece.”

  Hem nodded and said that would be fine. He was just going to write down what Camilla had told him.

  It didn’t look like anyone other than Louise had noticed that Jonas had come downstairs while they were talking. He was standing over next to his father, looking at the policeman, who he obviously recognized from the last time.

  Henrik absentmindedly stroked his son’s hair before going into the living room, but he shook his head when Jonas whispered something to him. It was obvious that he was already thinking about how to word the introduction to his op-ed column.

  Jonas stood there for a second, hesitantly, as if he couldn’t quite decide if he should go back up to his room as his father had told him.

  That made Louise stand up and go put her arm around him. They walked up to his room together.

  33

  CAMILLA WATCHED THEM AS THEY DISAPPEARED UP THE STAIRS. She wished she could go with them and avoid having to relive what had happened in the church. Instead, she dutifully responded to the questions, which were being asked in chronological order. When had she arrived at the church? Had she seen anyone as she walked across the courtyard? Was the door shut all the way when she entered the church?

  Camilla thought about the last time they had been sitting in the pastor’s kitchen and how the boys had said the door had been open.

  “It was shut all the way,” she assured the officer, pushing her cup of coffee, which had now grown cold, away a little and putting her elbows on the table to rest her head in her hands.

  After they’d run through the brief explanation, Camilla felt as though Officer Hem was staring at her, and she noticed he was breathing heavily. Finally he added one last thing.

  “Could we agree that you’ll hold off on writing anything about this until tomorrow?” he began. “I’d really like to have a chance to find out what’s going on before we go to the press with this.”

  Camilla made a little face, which silenced him.

  “You don’t need to worry about that.” She let her hands drop down onto the table and shook her head slightly. “I’m not working right now.”

  Officer Hem raised one eyebrow.

  “I’m on a leave of absence,” Camilla explained briefly, adding wanly that he didn’t need to worry that she would inform her editor either.

  “I would actually prefer not to have any contact with the paper at all while I’m on leave,” she said, looking down at the table. “But of course I can’t guarantee that they won’t find out about this on their own,” she added after a brief pause. “Morgenavisen does have quite a track record on stuff like that.”

  He nodded, and Camilla got the sense that he wanted to say something else, but was interrupted by Louise coming back down the stairs.

  Louise walked into the living room, where Henrik was bent over his computer. She waited for a moment before she interrupted his writing.

  “What would you say to Jonas coming with Camilla and me when we leave in a bit?” she asked. “I think it might be nice for him to get out of here for a little while, while the crime-scene investigators are working in the church. Then you can also finish writing,” she added.

  He ran his hand through his hair and Louise could see that he found the offer tempting, but at the same time he didn’t want to be any trouble.

  “He’s very welcome,” Louise reassured him. “And he can stay until tomorrow, when Markus will be home from his dad’s place.”

  “I really want to go,” they heard Jonas say from the stairs, and Louise could see that that settled the matter.
<
br />   “But remember your toothbrush,” the pastor called and smiled at his son as he turned and ran back upstairs to pack.

  “Thank you,” he said. “If you don’t have any family, you don’t get many chances when a situation suddenly comes up and you could use a little break,” he admitted, and looked at his computer screen. “Then I could use my evening to clean up my sermon for tomorrow. Today certainly turned out a little different than I’d planned,” he admitted and looked at his watch, as if he had been reminded yet again that a good portion of the afternoon was already gone.

  “If they’re even going to let me use the church tomorrow, that is.” He gave Louise a questioning look. “There’s a baptism tomorrow.”

  “We’ll have to see what Frandsen says, but I would imagine the investigators can get enough done today that they’ll be done before tomorrow.”

  “Although if the parents for the baptism hear what happened, they might decide not to come.”

  He ran his hand through his thick blonde hair again.

  “Well, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the church or you,” Louise said, trying to allay his concerns.

  The pastor nodded and got up to give his son a hug before he left.

  Officer Hem had gone, and it looked like Camilla had pulled herself together enough that she was ready to get going.

  Louise told her they would be having an extra overnight guest and bent down to pick up her friend’s bag, which had slid down onto the floor.

  “Did you remember your cell phone?” Henrik asked Jonas, after one more hug goodbye.

  “Yes, and the charger,” Jonas said, sounding impatient to get going.

  Camilla was pale as she waved to Henrik, but she said that she would call him so they could set a new time for the funeral.

  “I just don’t know if I’m up to planning the whole thing another time,” she admitted as she crossed the courtyard away from the police cars. A couple of curious bystanders had taken up position by the wall of the cemetery, and Jonas shuddered faintly as they walked over to Camilla’s car.

  “Maybe we ought to drop the ceremony and have a beer and play a Johnny Cash number in his honor instead,” Camilla mused.

  Louise smiled at her and asked if she wanted to take any of the flowers she had brought into the church home.

  Camilla made a face.

  “What do you think? Do you have enough vases for them? Oh, how fun to be surrounded by them for the rest of the weekend!”

  Louise left her bike there. She shut the front door after Camilla was in, and, feeling like she was responsible for two convalescents that she had to have on the mend by the time the weekend was over, she climbed in behind the wheel and started the car.

  34

  IT TOOK WlLLUMSEN LESS THAN A MINUTE TO YANK LOUISE BACK to reality when he started the briefing Monday morning by announcing that the group investigating the two murders had just been cut in half.

  He was standing there holding his coffee cup, staring at each of them—Toft, Stig, Lars, and finally Louise, who was leaning back complacently in her chair, looking forward to a calm start to the week after a Sunday that had turned out to be quite pleasant.

  Saturday afternoon everything had been forced and tedious. Camilla lay down in Louise’s guest room with some magazines, and Jonas had alternated between sitting in front of the PlayStation that was hooked up to the TV in her bedroom and being engrossed in his Harry Potter book.

  It was funny that in a lot of ways he was the diametrical opposite of Markus. Camilla’s son had short blonde hair, and Jonas’s was dark and hung way down over his eyes. Jonas was very focused and liked to concentrate on the things he did. He had played guitar since he was seven without losing interest, which impressed Louise.

  Markus was more impulsive and got all excited about new things, but he still hadn’t managed to find anything that really, truly held his attention. The last thing had been break-dancing. Louise wished that at least a little of Jonas’s love of reading would rub off on Markus—and even though the pastor’s son seemed a little introverted and shy, she couldn’t help but notice that Markus really admired him.

  Louise had spent her time in the kitchen with a newspaper until she offered to go pick up some pizzas around seven. After that, they’d watched a 1970s Danish con-men movie about the Olsen Gang and turned in early.

  Mik Rasmussen had called in the middle of the movie and asked if she wanted to come out to Holbæk on Sunday. He tempted her with sea kayaking, sex, barbecue—as long as the weather held—and maybe a single Irish coffee. She had been a little too curt when she turned him down and could tell right away that she’d hurt his feelings. She hadn’t meant to do that, but she knew that what they had together was part of a totally different world right now. She spent most of the evening worrying that Jonas was regretting having accepted her invitation to spend the night. They hardly knew each other, so she’d told him several times that he should just let her know if he’d rather go home, but each time he’d said he wanted to stay.

  They had all slept in on Sunday, and it wasn’t until around 11:00 that they headed down to the Belis Bar for brunch. Camilla was still a little quiet and withdrawn, but when Markus came back from his dad’s place in the early afternoon, they had managed to persuade her to join them in going to the pool. In the beginning, she just sat there wrapped in a big bathrobe watching the boys as they jumped off the diving boards, but then they lured her into joining them in going down the slide, which curved down into the pool from ceiling height, going in and out of the wall of the building, and the two boys almost threw up, they were laughing so hard, as Louise and Camilla thundered down into the water shrieking at the tops of their lungs.

  When she took Jonas home that evening, she suddenly felt like she was part of a real family. Not that this was something she craved, but just then she had to admit it felt nice. Her mission had also been a success. The convalescents seemed to be doing better.

  “We have a new case, so we’re splitting up our resources,” Willumsen announced, his eyes on Louise as if he’d noticed that her thoughts were still elsewhere.

  Louise straightened up and pulled her chair all the way in to the table.

  “We’ll have to make do with just two people continuing to work with Mikkelsen and his people on solving the Vesterbro case, while the other two move on to the new case.”

  Stig was about to protest but was stopped by Willumsen’s hand.

  “It’s too early to move people off this,” Toft said over the raised hand. “If we pull back, they get free reign again. You know there’s no way we’ll be able to get to the bottom of what they’re up to and keep an eye on things without more people.”

  “Of course you can, and I’m going to need to see some progress soon. We’re not getting anywhere and nothing’s happening,” he grumbled, staring grimly at them before straightening up and changing his tone. “This Saturday a dead infant was found out in Stenhøj Church in Frederiksberg. This is something you’re aware of, Rick.”

  It wasn’t a question, and he wasn’t expecting Louise to respond, because he continued.

  “Our colleagues from the Bellahøj station were out there for a similar case a couple of weeks ago. In that case, the infant was found alive.”

  He pulled the top sheet of paper out of the case file he had on the table in front of him.

  “They did an autopsy on the infant yesterday afternoon, and I have the provisional findings here. Flemming Larsen writes.…”

  He pulled his reading glasses out of his chest pocket. Louise felt the anxiety moving from her stomach toward her solar plexus. To anyone who knew anything about Willumsen, the sign was obvious. Something was wrong. They must have found something in the autopsy that changed the case from a family tragedy to a particular type of crime, otherwise the case wouldn’t be assigned to them. The Bellahøj precinct was perfectly well equipped to handle most things on their own.

  Louise considered Willumsen’s face as he read th
e text, paraphrasing it in his own words. He ran through it quickly at first.

  “The infant was wrapped, a newborn boy, no more than a couple of days old. The body had a faint greenish tinge as you might find with chorioamnionitis, or amniotic fluid infection, and it was still covered with dried blood and vernix caseosa.”

  Here he slowed down slightly.

  “Beyond that, Flemming writes that the umbilical cord had been crudely severed from the mother and the skin had peeled off in several locations.”

  The door suddenly opened, and Suhr came in and sat down with a face that made it clear he wanted to cause as little disruption as possible, so they should just continue. The look was wasted on Willumsen, who didn’t respond to the homicide chief’s arrival at all.

  “The peeling is a type called maceration and may indicate that the infant died prior to birth. But the reason this case has landed on our desks now is …”

  Finally he looked up to make sure he had their attention.

  “… that the infant is missing its pinky toe. And we’re not talking about a birth defect. It was chopped off after the birth. The surface of the wound is smooth and even, so it was amputated with a sharp instrument. Flemming is sure the toe was removed after the boy’s death, otherwise there would have been a reaction in the form of bleeding, and that is why he concludes with great certainty that we’re talking about a stillbirth.”

  Now Willumsen looked directly at Lars and Louise.

  “This is your case now. Bellahøj will continue to investigate the abandoned baby that was taken to Skodsborg Orphanage a week ago. At the moment there is no reason to think that the two cases are connected, but obviously you should consider that. For the time being we’ll run the two investigations separately and think of them as two separate cases. It’s far more likely that the church was chosen because of all the media attention. The injury the infant boy incurred doesn’t have anything to do with Baby Girl. She was in good condition when she was abandoned. This will definitely involve a ton of routine work, and I want you two to personally get in touch with all the mothers who were scheduled to give birth within the last two weeks, and the ones whose due dates are within the next fourteen days.”