The Running Girl

by Sara Blaedel

  Now all of a sudden it was “you” and not “we.”

  “What the hell’s going on with the blinds rolled down and the refrigerator? It looks like he’s moved in for good.”

  “Albinism, it’s called. Albinos are very sensitive to light, so we should be considerate of that,” the lieutenant said.

  Louise could tell that he was starting to get irritated.

  Inside the office her phone rang. It was a guard from the entry gate saying that Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen wanted to talk with her.

  “Will you come get him?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She walked out to the kitchen to see if there was any coffee made.

  * * *

  “I bought the building five years ago as an investment,” Ulrik said.

  He took a cup from Louise. She pushed an extra chair over to her desk and asked him to have a seat.

  Sejr gave her guest a brief nod, but kept his eyes glued on his computer screen. He said no thank you to Louise’s offer of coffee, and pulled a fresh cola out of his fridge.

  “It’s a big warehouse. Some of it’s rented out, but the rest is empty,” Ulrik explained, adding that an attendant down at the harbor worked for him as a sort of vice-landlord. “It caught me completely by surprise that anyone was using the boathouse. I hadn’t been informed of it.”

  Louise looked at Ulrik and leaned forward slightly.

  “Does Britt know that the boys hung out on your property?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes, now she does. But she also knows that I have no idea who they were or how long they’ve hung out down there. It’s just today that I started working again, and I only have one meeting to go to here in the city. After that I’m driving out and talking with the attendant to find out what’s been happening, and then he’ll have to toss them out.”

  They sat for a bit.

  “I’ve also made arrangements for the police to go by there. On my way over here, I called Bellahøj and informed the officer on the case. I just thought you should know how it’s connected.”

  Louise nodded and again thought of Britt.

  “Is there anything new? Are the boys saying anything?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “No, not as far as I know. At least, we haven’t heard anything new.”

  She could see he was shaken. Understandably. It was completely absurd that the family themselves had given the hooligans a roof over their heads—even if unwillingly.

  “How did Britt take it?”

  A tinge of sadness came over his face, and he rubbed his forehead.

  “She’s finally sleeping after spending most of the night crying. She thinks we could have prevented it, either by not having had the party at all or by both of us being there together. And I’m inclined to agree with her. But Britt feels she was irresponsible for having taken it on herself to be there alone, and I think it’s unreasonably hard for her to take all the blame, which is just as much my own. I should have been with my family when all of this happened.”

  Louise watched him as he sat and fell to pieces.

  “She’s hit even harder now that we know that the suspects stayed in my building,” he said. Then he added, “And I really don’t know how I’ll tell her that these youths may get by with a charge of unlawful trespass and assault on her. At least that’s what the young officer I spoke with this morning predicts. She wants them sentenced for driving Signe to her death.”

  “Let’s see what they get when they have a proper talk with the boys and clear up the events of the evening,” said Louise. “I’ll call the officer, Kent, and hear what comes out of the interrogations.”

  Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen thanked her, and when they parted Louise stood and watched him as he walked down the stairs. His shoulders were slouched, and he seemed smaller than the first time she’d met him.

  “Now we’ll unpack these bank statements move by move,” Sejr informed Louise when she came back into the office.

  He’d put on his headphones.

  “Volbeat,” he said, nodding along. “I don’t like to stop in the middle of an album.”

  She said no to a cola and sat down. He’d taken copies of the bank statements and put a set on her desk.

  “If you go through his private accounts, then I’ll look at his business account. He’s registered as HartmannImport/Export.”

  He passed a printout from Business Affairs across the table.

  Louise was about to protest when the door burst open and Willumsen yanked Suhr with him into the office, telling the lieutenant to explain what was happening to his investigation group. He flipped on the fluorescent ceiling lights and scowled at Sejr, who sat with his hood pulled up over his head.

  “Who the hell’s that, and what’s all this computer gear set up in here?”

  Without looking at Willumsen, Sejr Gylling stood up and went over to turn off the light.

  “My eyes can’t take strong light,” he told Louise, ignoring the argument that was heating up.

  “I’m the one who’s in charge of staffing in this department,” Suhr said.

  He looked Willumsen straight in the eyes.

  Louise leaned back and looked at her two bosses. She knew Willumsen well enough to know that he wouldn’t willingly hand over his cases to others. In his investigation group, he was the one who made decisions. He scavenged extra people when he needed them, but on the other hand he’d give some of his own investigators to other lead investigators when necessary. It would also go against his grain to admit that his own people weren’t capable of managing a case. But given that this case apparently involved a financial crime, she was glad that Suhr had agreed with her about asking Fraud for help.

  “I’m not in favor of this,” yelled Willumsen.

  Suhr had to pull him out in the hall and close the office door.

  Louise felt like she’d had her hair blown back by a hurricane.

  On the other side of the desk, the man from Fraud sat unfazed, his eyes on columns of figures.

  Something about Willumsen has changed, she thought. He’d always been boastful and ill-tempered, but ever since last summer when he learned that his wife Annelise had stomach cancer and had to have a large tumor removed, there were days when he was intolerable. Given the circumstances, the ones who knew him could bear with him, but it was worse for outsiders.

  A little while later Suhr opened the door.

  “I’m so damned sorry about that,” he said.

  Sejr Gylling looked up and shrugged his shoulders.

  To Louise it seemed like his pale blue eyes fixed on Suhr, holding him at a distance with a kind of reverse magnetic force. It wasn’t until Sejr turned his eyes back to his papers that the lieutenant came into the office.

  “It’s not always so easy with Willumsen,” he said.

  He seemed a little sheepish being brushed off by the new man on the team.

  “I’m concentrating on clearing things up now,” said Sejr. “When Louise Rick and I have sorted out what happened we can listen to what that man has to say. OK?”

  Again, he fixed his eyes on the lieutenant, until Suhr stepped back, clearly satisfied with the decision.

  * * *

  When the door closed, they sat for a while and silence settled around them.

  Louise hated numbers. She took the pile of papers with printouts from Hartmann’s private bank account, intending to get it over with quickly so she could be out the door. Nevertheless, she got absorbed in the bank statements, looking through them for connections that might help them clear things up.

  Before she knew it, it was already past six o’clock. The time had gotten away from her, and she hurriedly packed her things up to rush home to Jonas, feeling a tinge of guilt. On her way down the stairs, she decided she’d stop and buy Thai takeout. Chicken satay was one of Jonas’s favorites.

  But when she unlocked the door and came in with the takeout bag in her hand, the apartment was empty and dark, and there was no note
on the kitchen table.

  Louise set the bag aside and sank into a kitchen chair. She tried to collect her thoughts. Had they agreed to something and she’d forgotten it? It was Wednesdays when Jonas went to guitar.

  She tried his cell phone and heard it buzzing on his desk. Now she noticed that his book bag was in the hall, and that the computer in his room was on. So, he had been home.

  Louise started to set the table. Figured he’d gone to the convenience store or over to the library. But when it got to be eight o’clock, she started to worry in earnest.

  She went into his room and checked his cell phone for texts. Maybe he’d made plans and just forgotten to tell her about it, even though that wouldn’t be like him. But his in-box only had messages she’d sent him and a couple from his schoolmates, but they were several days old.

  The Thai food was still in its paper bag when she sat down and called Lasse’s parents.

  “No,” Lasse’s mother said in an apologetic tone. “He’s not here, but let me just ask Lasse if he knows anything.”

  Louise waited patiently.

  “No,” she said when she came back on. “Sorry.”

  For a moment, Louise closed her eyes and sat completely still, trying to bring some calm to her thoughts.

  The library was the most likely possibility, she decided. She grabbed her coat and hurried down the stairs. She ran across Falkoner Allé and was out of breath when she reached the main entrance of the library, which had just closed.

  She knocked several times on the glass window, and finally succeeded in getting a librarian to come over and push the door ajar.

  “Are you positive no one else is inside?”

  The man nodded and didn’t remember seeing a dark-haired boy sitting by himself.

  “There’s hardly been anyone in here tonight. There must be handball on TV.”

  As Louise walked back, she had her hands in her pockets and her eyes on the ground. She made a determined effort to tamp down the unnerving fear that came from thinking of the many possible explanations for why Jonas wasn’t at home. The most reasonable one still was that he’d made plans impulsively. But without his cell?

  And then a thought struck her. Could he have gotten it into his head to go out to the boathouse, now that he knew where the older boys stayed?

  Louise ran the last stretch up to the entrance, and the door slammed behind her as she took the stairs in leaps to get to her car keys so she could drive out there.

  She’d just put the key in the keyhole when the door down on the third floor opened up and she heard Jonas call her.

  She stepped over to the landing and looked down.

  On the third floor to the left lived Melvin Pehrsson. Jonas stood in his doorway. When she’d gotten down, she peered over his head into a darkened entryway that smelled of old man and cigars.

  “Have you been here the whole time?”

  Her anger was uncontrollable and rising faster than she could rein it in.

  He nodded.

  “What the hell were you thinking? I’ve been running around looking for you.”

  She’d never raised her voice at him, but now she stood in the middle of the hallway and yelled.

  Melvin Pehrsson showed up behind Jonas. Louise had never spoken to him before, just greeted him when they met on the stairs. A musty old homosexual, is what she thought he was, without having proof that it was true. Only that he looked to be somewhere in his midseventies.

  “What are you doing down here?” she asked, her voice still raised.

  “Maybe we should go into the living room,” the man suggested and put his hand on Jonas’s shoulder.

  Louise wanted to slap it away, but collected herself and instead pulled the boy out of the doorway and with her up the stairs.

  “How could you even think of going in there with a strange man you don’t even know?” she asked when they’d gotten into their apartment. “He’s odd, one of those people who keeps to himself. No one here in our section knows anything about him, and he never goes to the general meetings or garden parties.”

  They sat down in the kitchen. Jonas kept his eyes on the floor, but then he looked up with those dark eyes under his thick bangs.

  “I know him.”

  Louise scooted back in her chair.

  “You know him? You’ve only lived here for three months, so there’s no way you know him well enough to go down into his apartment without letting me know first.”

  “It was my dad who buried Nancy when she died four years ago. Ever since then he’s gone to the cemetery two times a week with fresh flowers.”

  “Who the hell’s Nancy?”

  “His wife.”

  “Honey, Jonas—he’s never had a wife.”

  “Yes,” he said and nodded. “He has, but she’s been in a home for the past thirteen years, without being conscious. She was Australian, and when they lived there she was given some medicine that damaged her brain. But she was still his wife, and he arranged for her to come back with him to Denmark and stay in a decent place where they took good care of her.”

  “Why haven’t you ever told me that you know our downstairs neighbor?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “And why did you suddenly decide to go down to him today?”

  “It’s not something I suddenly did today,” he said.

  His defiance was gone, but he didn’t look to be plagued by guilty feelings, either.

  “We’re friends. I often go down to him.”

  “Friends?”

  “I visit him when I come home from school. He’s helped me with my homework. I didn’t know you’d be so angry. He likes me to visit, and we have a good time together. He’s a research historian and has written for some of the big periodicals, but he stopped when Nancy got sick.”

  Louise listened in surprise.

  “Of course you can visit him,” she said quietly. “And I’m sorry for yelling at you. I just panicked because I didn’t know where you were. What do you two do?”

  “Right now, we’re starting to go through a bunch of material from the time when Mylius-Erichsen led the Danmark Expedition through Northeast Greenland in 1906 to 08.”

  “Let’s go down and say hi to him,” she suggested. “Do you think he’s eaten, or have you been too absorbed in the sled rides?”

  “He doesn’t usually make food for himself. He mostly eats sandwiches.”

  Louise unpacked the Thai food and gave it a zap in the microwave, then divided it onto three plates.

  * * *

  “Heavenly,” exclaimed Melvin Pehrsson when Louise asked, a little sheepishly, whether it was all right to bring food on a first visit.

  Surprisingly clean, she noted, even though the cigar smell hung over the whole apartment. But it was nice, and there were fresh flowers in the vases.

  “I buy some for myself, too, when I go over and visit her grave,” he said when he caught her looking. He pointed at the dining table and asked them to sit down, then he disappeared into the kitchen for three soft drinks.

  The pictures on the wall were paintings in thickly gilded frames, and most of the furniture was dark wood. There was something about the living room that made her think of her own grandmother and the little apartment she’d lived in out on Toftegårds Allé. Safe and pleasant—Louise had loved to go there.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She looked for the words that would get her started on an apology.

  “I owe you an explanation,” the elderly man said, preempting her.

  His hair was more white than gray. His face hung a little on the left side—maybe a stroke had left its mark—but other than that, her downstairs neighbor seemed energetic and in good shape. Now that she was with him up close there wasn’t much musty about him.

  “I’ve never really done anything to socialize with the others in the building. When my wife was still alive, I spent almost all my time out with her, and now that she’s not here anymore, I’m pretty bad about
getting lost in my memories. Thankfully, we were able to spend many good years together. And then, I was lucky enough to meet this young man here.”

  Jonas smiled, and Louise said she’d already heard how they’d gotten to know each other.

  “You’ve become friends, I understand.”

  Melvin Pehrsson nodded.

  “His father was a great support for me when Nancy died. The time that followed that was hard to get through. So, I know all about what it’s like to lose the one who’s the absolute closest to you, and there are times when it helps to talk about the ones who aren’t with us anymore.”

  Louise understood that only too well, and even though his words might have concealed a slight reproach—that she hadn’t been there for Jonas when he missed his father—she was sure that wasn’t what the man had meant.

  “We just seem to have found each other,” he said and gave Jonas’s arm a little squeeze. “But we have a damned hard time forgiving the man upstairs for not preventing what happened to the boy’s father.”

  Louise had only known Henrik Holm a very short time before he was killed in the tragic culmination of a case that, without his knowing it, had threads leading out to his church in Frederiksberg.

  “What’s it been, three or four years we’ve known each other? Doesn’t that sound right?” Melvin Pehrsson asked.

  He looked over at Jonas, but nodded himself and continued talking.

  “I used to attend the presentations over in the rectory, and then I’d do a little here and there when the steward was on vacation.”

  How bizarre, thought Louise, to find out that her neighbor shared a history with Jonas. She’d tried several times to establish a relationship with the adults who’d been friends with Henrik Holm, so the boy would have someone to talk with who knew his father, but every time Jonas was brushed off. But what the hell would that matter when he already had Pehrsson right underneath him.

  “Now I hope I can give back a little of what I received when I was the one who’d lost someone. The boy’s father was so good about coming to the nursing home when Nancy was still there. Then we’d have us a good talk, and he’d hear all my wonderful memories. That’s how I know it’s important to have someone to talk with when you’re trying to get through it. But fortunately, it seems we have many other things to talk about together.”