The Running Girl

by Sara Blaedel

  And it was three of their guys who sat in holding cells at Police Headquarters awaiting trial. Louise wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of them confessed before the week was up. First and foremost, for the sake of their group’s prestige, but also because the personal status of having shot down someone from a rival group far outweighed going to jail.

  “I honestly don’t know what it could have been about,” said Mie. “They seemed to want the TV and all the rest. The computer and a couple of the paintings we have hanging in the living room. They were also out in the garage, where Nick keeps his Mercedes and our summer car is parked.”

  Louise looked at her.

  “What kind is it?” she asked.

  “A BMW convertible. Brand-new, but we only use it when it’s sunny out.”

  “Did they take anything when they were here?”

  Mie Hartmann shook her head.

  Louise stood up and asked to see the things they’d mentioned, and the widow reluctantly stood up and followed her.

  In the half-dark living room, Louise hadn’t noticed at first how the room was sprinkled with Bang & Olufsen electronics and high-end designer floor and ceiling lamps from Piet Hein and Verner Panton. The fact that the paintings weren’t bought at Ikea was something even Louise, who didn’t know much about art, could see. Her first impression was that there’d been a lot of money that needed to be put into things that held their value.

  The living room was also much larger than she’d first realized. It kept going around a brick fireplace in the corner.

  “They must have thought he owed them a lot if they wanted to empty the entire house of its valuables,” Louise said.

  She took the cup of coffee that Mie’s mother handed her and let her eyes wander around again.

  “What happened when they came back at night?” she asked, looking over at Mie.

  The widow had sat down on the edge of the sofa. Her back was straight and she sat completely still, until her face cracked and the tears rushed out.

  The grandmother came flying in from the kitchen carrying a coffee Thermos and a plate of cookies. She quickly put them down on the sofa table and sat next to her daughter to comfort her.

  * * *

  Mie wiped her tears away and took a sip of the coffee her mother poured for her.

  “It must have been a little past eleven when they came,” she said. “I was lying on the bed in the bedroom with Cecilie. She’d finally fallen asleep, and the door was open, so I could see in to Nick. He was lying here on the sofa and watching TV.”

  She patted the sofa cushions.

  “We didn’t hear anything before the shots suddenly burst through the windows. It sounded like an explosion. Nick ran out to the utility room, where he keeps his own weapon.”

  The tears fell again, and she apparently didn’t notice it when Louise made a note that the deceased had been in possession of a weapon in his home.

  “Cecilie woke up and started crying. I took her and sat on the floor, so we wouldn’t get hit if they went behind the house and started shooting in that way.”

  She pointed into the bedroom, where Louise estimated there was about three feet on either side of the bed. Even with a night stand on either side of the double bed, there was still enough room to sit in both corners and see into the living room.

  “They must have seen him run, because all of a sudden they fired into the kitchen.”

  She covered her ears with her hands, as if she were reliving it and heard every gunshot.

  “It just went on and on.”

  Mie Hartmann rocked back and forth, her hands still covering her ears.

  “It was like an attack from a whole bunch of soldiers. The shots sounded like they were coming from every direction, both here and out in the kitchen. I don’t know how many there were, but there was definitely more than one.”

  She dropped her hands into her lap, as if the gunfire had settled down.

  “It looked like Nick jumped over the dining table to come hide with us, but then Zato was lying there and…”

  Louise gave her plenty of time. While she waited, her eyes took in all the details of the living room.

  “I’d already called the police when I was sitting on the floor,” Mie said through her tears. “And they could hear shots being fired.”

  That agreed with the emergency call at 10:37, Louise thought. She circled the time on her pad.

  “And it wasn’t long before I heard the sirens. But by then they’d stopped shooting, and I think I heard them driving away. At any rate, I heard a car start up and drive off,” she corrected herself and said that she didn’t dare get up until the police had arrived.

  She hid her face in her hands.

  “And Nick was on the floor. If I’d come out sooner, maybe I could have helped him.”

  “I think it was good you looked after your little daughter,” Louise said.

  Just then, her cell phone rang. It was Jonas. She looked at the wall clock hanging beside the Bang & Olufsen flat-screen TV; it was barely nine o’clock. For a second she’d been afraid she’d lost track of time, but then realized there was still an hour and a half before she needed to pick him up.

  “Hi,” she said calmly and stepped away from Mie and her mother.

  The tone of Jonas’s voice yanked her out of her calm state.

  “Hurry up and get here! Quick!” he said.

  7

  His voice was shrill, and Louise could tell he was scared.

  “Some big kids came and wanted to be let into the party. One of them twisted Lasse’s arm around, and now they’re standing over by Signe’s presents.”

  Louise heard noise, and a boy’s rough voice said, “Shut your ass up!”

  “Her mother told them to leave. But they won’t.”

  “Jonas, stay away from them. Don’t provoke them or say anything. Just grab your coat and I’ll come pick you up.”

  “They’re breaking everything!”

  He was on the verge of tears.

  “I’m going now.”

  She stood with her bag over her shoulder. The noise in the background had increased. She heard glass shatter and a girl scream.

  “Jonas, hang on. I just have to say good-bye.”

  In the living room, she hurriedly excused herself and took down the address to the grandmother’s house, out behind Damhusengen. She promised to keep them informed and said that there was no problem with Mie and her daughter moving out of the house for a bit, as long as the police could get in touch with them.

  The grandmother followed her out through the kitchen. Louise heard the door carefully being locked behind her as she hurried to her car.

  * * *

  Her GPS said she was eleven minutes from her destination. Louise plugged her headset into her cell phone and asked Jonas to tell her what had happened.

  “Start at the beginning,” she said.

  “They came while we were dancing. We’d eaten, and afterward we moved the tables out to the side so we’d have a dance floor.”

  “How many are there?” she asked. “Are there any from your school?”

  She heard a girl crying and a noise like something being thrown against a wall.

  “Four. No, there are five. I don’t know any of them, and they’re breaking everything.”

  His voice had grown thin, and before he could get anything else out he was drowned out by a terrified scream.

  Louise sped up and drove too fast. Way too fast.

  “Two of them have gone behind the bar. They want Signe’s mother to give them beer and booze, but we don’t have any of that down here.”

  His voice rose.

  Louise thought she could hear Britt in the middle of the commotion.

  “One of them’s emptying out the cabinets, and they’re tossing everything on the floor. They think there’s cigarettes.”

  Jonas was silent for a moment, but then she heard his voice again.

  “Now one of them’s got Britt’s bag. He’s
taking her purse.”

  Jonas stopped talking.

  “Has anyone called the police?” Louise yelled.

  Several children cried in the background.

  He still didn’t answer, and over the sound of crying children she suddenly heard a deeper laughter.

  “Jonas!” she screamed. “What’s happening there?”

  “Two of them are taking Signe’s mother outside,” he whispered so quietly she almost couldn’t hear him. “They’re hitting her.”

  He started to cry.

  “You need to get away. I’ll be there soon.”

  Louise could hear that he’d gone outside. She could also hear the blows and the cries of frightened children.

  “Her mother’s lying on the ground, but they keep hitting her.”

  Suddenly, Signe’s voice cut through the noise.

  “Stop it! You better stop it. Get out of here. Leave my mother alone!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

  Her voice sounded more angry than scared, and Louise heard her yelling desperately to try to rescue her mother.

  The scene painted itself so clearly before Louise’s mind that she practically felt the children’s fear physically through their voices slicing toward her in the dark. Her adrenaline pumped, but at the same time, her feeling of powerlessness rose.

  She stepped harder on the accelerator.

  “Now one of them’s standing and kicking Britt in the head,” Jonas cried into the receiver.

  Signe had stopped yelling. Only the sounds of blows and crying made their way through to Louise.

  “I’ll call the police. But you need to get hold of some more of the adults,” she ordered loudly, so he could hear her.

  “The other one’s run after Signe,” Jonas screamed desperately through his tears.

  Louise’s heart hammered against her chest as she told Jonas to hold on while she called 112. When she got through to the emergency center, she quickly told about the assault and explained where the sailing club was on Svanemølle Harbor.

  “We already have cars on the way,” said the dispatcher. “We’ve had five or six calls from out there over the last few minutes.”

  “They can’t drive all the way down there,” said Louise.

  She waited impatiently at a red light near Svanemøllen Station.

  “Park the cars at the Port Harbor office,” she said. “The sailing club is at the end of the pier.”

  The light finally turned, and she tossed her cell phone on the passenger seat.

  * * *

  She tore off on the last short stretch, and just when she’d made it down to where Strandvænget turned, she saw a moving van stopped in the middle of the road. Its hazard lights were on and both front doors were open. Two people stood bent over a figure lying in the road.

  Louise turned on her hazards, too. She swung in over the bike lane and left her car. As she ran toward the accident scene, she heard sirens in the distance coming closer.

  She was almost right beside her before Louise saw the lilac fabric of the dress, and the strength ebbed out of her legs. She sank down beside Signe’s seemingly lifeless body and looked up at the man she assumed was the van driver.

  He was around sixty and obviously in shock. Behind him, his wife walked around and around in small circles with her face in her hands.

  “We called for an ambulance,” he said.

  Blood ran from a dark wound in the back of Signe’s head.

  Louise felt completely empty inside.

  “I didn’t see her,” the man said. “Out of nowhere, she was there, like a flash in the dark, and then I noticed the bump.”

  A police car arrived, and Louise quickly stood up. Introduced herself and directed them to the parking lot, then to the pier, and on out to the sailing club. When the next police car came, she directed it behind her Saab on the bike lane and said, as calmly as she could, that she knew who the girl was.

  “Her name’s Signe. She and her mother are holding a party at the sailing club. You need to get hold of the father. His name’s Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen, and he’s staying at Dragsholm Castle, where his firm’s holding some seminar, but I don’t have his phone number.”

  The van driver squatted down next to Signe. With two fingers, he felt for a pulse in her neck.

  Louise wanted to go down to Jonas, but instead walked up closer and sank to her knees beside the older man. She couldn’t see if Signe was breathing. The darkness put her in shadow, even though her light skin stood out against the asphalt.

  The man removed his hand. For a moment, he hid his face in his hands despairingly, as if he were trying to control his thoughts.

  “She’s alive,” he got out.

  With a blank stare, he turned to Louise and told her he was a doctor in private practice in Søborg.

  “We were helping our youngest one move. The van’s rented.”

  Louise leaned over Signe. Her eyes were closed, and the blood made her curls stick together.

  “She has swelling on both sides of her head, and there’s bleeding from both ears,” said the doctor. “I’m afraid she may have suffered a serious skull fracture.”

  He shook his head and stood up with difficulty to give room to the rescuers, who’d stepped in.

  “We need to stabilize her,” one of them said and went back to the ambulance for a neck brace. “It looks serious.”

  The doctor’s wife sat down on the curb with her arms around her legs and her face hidden against her knees.

  8

  As Signe was being lifted onto the stretcher, Louise saw Jonas in her mind; and while the rescuers carefully rolled the girl to the ambulance, she started running to the sailing club.

  The fear in his voice had been like a thick coating, and everything in Louise wanted to protect him from more pain after what he’d just gone through with his father. She felt so bad for him that it made her chest ache. She pictured his thick bangs and his dark, serious eyes.

  As she ran, a feeling of claustrophobia tightened around her. Suddenly she couldn’t take any more bad news after everything else that had happened recently, and she felt an uncontrollable need to turn and run away. Away from all of it. But as she crossed the parking lot to the marina, she sped up and continued down the pier.

  When she reached the sailing club, two officers leaned over Britt, who lay on the flagstones outside the little terrace. Blood ran from her eye and cheek, and the entire right side of her face looked like an open wound. The two officers tried to calm her. One of them tried to press a towel against her face to stop the blood flow, but she was trying to get up.

  “Where’s Signe?” she cried.

  She pushed the towel away so she could turn her head.

  More responders arrived. The high, shrill siren went quiet when the ambulance stopped on the road above, but its vehement blue lights flashed on through the evening darkness and cast a glow out across the water.

  Louise introduced herself and told them she knew about the party being held inside the sailing club. One of the officers stood up. He was young and seemed unsure of himself when he pulled her off to the side and out of earshot.

  “What do you know about what happened in there?” he asked.

  He took out his pad from an inside pocket.

  “I have a foster son who’s in the same class as the girl who was hosting the party,” she said. “He called me about twenty minutes ago and told me that some bigger boys had shown up and destroyed everything, and they wouldn’t leave. When Britt”—she nodded toward the woman on the ground—“told them to go, two of them went after her. And as far as I understood it, he also saw one of the boys run after her daughter, Signe, when she went for help. I arrived just before you did, which must be when the accident had just happened.”

  The officer nodded and wrote it down. Louise scanned the door to the sailing club’s party room. She hadn’t laid eyes on Jonas and was listening with only half an ear when the officer said that it was a little difficult to find out exactly
what had happened.

  “Some of the kids are saying that the older boys went outside, and two of them allegedly threw themselves on the mother while their companions tried to get them to stop. Others are saying she was attacked by the whole group that crashed the party. The uninvited guests were obviously long gone before we got here.”

  She placed her hand on his arm, trying to slow him down.

  “We’ll get to that later,” she said. “I need to find Jonas.”

  She kept her eyes on the sailing club and the group of children who stood in a tight clump. Several cried, some just stood completely still, and others held on to each other. They looked as if shock had been cast over them like a fishing net. She didn’t spot Jonas in the crowd.

  The atmosphere was chaotic, and when she asked after Jonas, no one had seen him. Louise could feel her blood pumping as she ran into the abandoned party room, calling for him. But there was no one inside; everyone had gathered out on the wharf. She ran around the clubhouse and first caught sight of him a long way off, over by the bulwark.

  She slowed her pace and tried to control her panic.

  “Was it Signe who got hurt up on the road?” he asked.

  He was hoarse from crying.

  Louise sat down next to him. She nodded and put her arm around him.

  “She ran out in front of a van,” Louise said quietly. “The driver couldn’t avoid hitting her.”

  Jonas sat completely stiff.

  “Did anything happen to her?”

  Louise took a deep breath.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid she’s been badly hurt.”

  She pulled him in to her. She smelled the harbor and heard the waves splashing while Jonas struggled not to cry.