The Running Girl

by Sara Blaedel

  Later, Louise had seen that Peter’s decision hadn’t come completely out of the blue. For years, he hadn’t hidden the fact that he wanted a family life with kids and their own place. She, on the other hand, didn’t want that at all. It was a relief to be rid of the pressure he’d put on her.

  * * *

  Only the Golf was parked in the double carport when Louise and Flemming Larsen made it out to Strandvænget. But it wasn’t much past four thirty, so maybe she’d been a little too optimistic to think Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen would already be home. She looked up at the large house, where someone had left the light over the front door on. Otherwise, the house looked abandoned.

  Flemming Larsen turned off the engine and gave the impression that he’d just sit there.

  “Please; you should come in with me,” she said.

  On the drive there, she’d told him about Signe and the party down at the sailing club, and it turned out Flemming already knew about the accident and had read the autopsy report. It was lying on his desk when he got back from his vacation.

  “I’m sure Britt would want to know how her daughter died. Right now, she’s imagining all kinds of things. So, come on in with me,” she said.

  She opened the car door and nodded up to the house.

  The afternoon had turned gray and damp, and a pungent smell of seaweed rose from Svanemølle Harbor, where the Power Station sent heavy columns of smoke into the air, climbing high up in the sky before they were carried away and dissolved in the wind.

  The gate stood open, and the garden path was littered with brown and yellow leaves that clung to each other and got stuck on the soles of their shoes as Louise and Flemming walked up to the house. The outdoor candles were full of water, and several of the roses hung with their petals withered at the edges and their leaves turned brown and curled.

  Britt answered the door in a dove-blue house dress, her hair held back in a wide gold barrette with embroidered roses. She looked curiously at Flemming Larsen and held the nearly six foot five medical examiner’s hands between hers, while Louise introduced them to each other.

  “How nice of you to come,” she told him.

  She stepped to the side and found a couple of hangers for their coats.

  “I’ve begged everyone I could think of to tell me what happened to my daughter the night she died. But no one could tell me anything more than that she died of her injuries. I’d be glad to have it cleared up,” she said, leading them through the living room and on out to the kitchen.

  “Would you like something? Tea or coffee?”

  The dining room was in partial darkness. Neither the candles nor the lamps had been lit, and on the long dining table there was a stack of newspapers in a lopsided pile, as if they were on their way to the recycling bin but got stranded along the way. The double doors into the music room and the other rooms were closed and the stereo system was shut off.

  “I mostly stay upstairs,” Britt said.

  She pointed them to the table along the kitchen wall, then found a pack of matches in a drawer and lit the pillar candles on the windowsill.

  “Actually, what I’d like is something cold,” Flemming Larsen said and pulled out a chair. He nodded his approval when Britt took a bottle of mineral water out of the refrigerator and asked if he’d drink something like that.

  When he settled into his chair, Louise noticed how his hair had started to go thin on top. His medium-length blond hair had gotten bleached during the three weeks in Thailand with sun and seawater, and it was cut so short that you really didn’t see the bald spot that was starting to appear on the top of his head. But normally, you wouldn’t have a chance to see it anyway because he was so tall. He had friendly wrinkles that ran down his cheeks when he smiled, and there was a convincing warmth and confidence in his green eyes, which were edged with brown around the irises. They always made Louise feel like she was in competent hands when she worked on a case with Flemming Larsen.

  Now his pleasant look was turned toward Britt Fasting-Thomsen, who’d filled up their glasses.

  “For Ulrik and me it is indescribable that our daughter isn’t here anymore,” she said and sank down into the last chair. “It seems like my life’s come to a halt. When I was out doing some shopping this morning, it felt like an insult that cars and buses still drove around. Everything just goes on and on, as if nothing happened. The newspapers are still full of that Sachs-Smith scandal. They ran that even before Signe died. But none of the papers have written more than a little paragraph about the accident that took her life. A paragraph. And then the obituary that we submitted ourselves.”

  She shook her head and rubbed her hand over her eyes, which were sad and tired. Their brilliance was gone. Britt Fasting-Thomsen was withering away.

  “What happened to her? Well, I know that she ran in front of a moving van. But how much did she know about it? Did she feel anything?”

  Her thin arms rested on the table, and her look was unguarded and vulnerable. She wasn’t hiding behind any notions she had of how her daughter had died.

  Louise saw Flemming Larsen thinking it over. He delayed by emptying his glass of water.

  “They say she died immediately. But she didn’t, did she?”

  Britt’s sea-blue eyes stared at him until he leaned forward in his chair and folded his hands in front of him.

  He shook his head.

  “Your daughter did not die immediately. No. But she was never conscious, so she didn’t feel anything. Didn’t suffer,” he assured her.

  Britt nodded.

  “If Signe had been hit by a passenger car, she would very likely have been thrown into the air at impact,” he said. “But when someone’s hit head-on by a moving van, as in your daughter’s case, then most of the body is hit. Besides that, her head was seriously injured when she was flung down on the asphalt.”

  Britt didn’t move and barely took a breath.

  “When the rescue workers got to her, she didn’t have any visible injuries on her face, just a few skin abrasions, but she had swelling on both sides of her head, with bleeding from her ears, and that raised the suspicion of a fracture in the bottom part of her neurocranium. Sometimes a blow to the head will produce injuries to the cerebral cortex and hemorrhages between the soft membranes of the brain.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone told me this?” Britt interrupted. She looked at Flemming in confusion.

  He shrugged his shoulders and couldn’t answer.

  “The scan showed that there was a large blood clot under the hard membranes of her brain and widespread injuries on her neurocranium. They were about to drill a small hole in her brain to release the pressure on her skull when she died.”

  He laid his hand over Britt’s limp arm.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “All of this happened while I was in the hospital. Why didn’t anyone tell me, so I could have been with her?”

  Louise put her arm around Britt’s shoulder.

  “At that point, you were on the operating table yourself,” she quietly reminded her.

  She hadn’t known any of what Flemming said, either. She’d been satisfied with the news that Signe had died shortly after arriving at the hospital.

  “What did they do then, after she died?” Britt whispered.

  “She was brought into the six-hours room,” said Flemming. “Everyone who’s pronounced dead is. We wait for there to be positive signs of death, and then the hospital porters come and push the deceased into the cooler. After that, we make a legal medical inspection of the body, and in this case, followed that with an autopsy. The doctors did everything they could to save your daughter.”

  He gave Britt’s arm a soft squeeze then straightened back up.

  Louise looked away. Thought he’d told her too much, was too detailed. She hoped Ulrik was on his way. To her surprise, Britt stood up and went over and put her arms around Flemming.

  “Thank you so very much,” she said and gave him a hug.

  “I actu
ally need to talk with Ulrik, but I can’t get hold of him. When do you expect him home?” Louise asked.

  She stood up to take their water glasses to the sink.

  “Not till Sunday. He’s on his way to Iceland. There are a bunch of his clients up there who aren’t having an easy time with their investments at the moment. But you should be able to reach him at the hotel this evening. He lands at eight o’clock, and so he should be at the hotel an hour later.”

  Britt no longer seemed so vulnerable, although she still looked tired.

  Flemming Larsen stood up, and Britt followed them out. She stood at the front door as they walked back to the medical examiner’s silver-gray Passat.

  25

  Louise’s cell phone had vibrated in her pocket when they were sitting in Britt’s kitchen. Now she saw that it was a message from Mik, who was in Copenhagen and wanted to know if she and Jonas would like to go out to eat with him before he drove back to Holbæk.

  She wrote back quickly, saying she was out on a case with Flemming, so it wasn’t a good time, but she was looking forward to seeing him during fall break. She and Jonas were spending a few days at her parents’ in Hvalsø, but several weeks back they’d made plans to go up to Mik’s and see the latest litter of puppies before they were delivered to their new families.

  “I can drop by with sushi, if that’s better?” he suggested in his next text.

  “Sounds good, but another time,” she wrote back and stuck her cell phone in her pocket.

  “Do you have the kids this week?” she asked as they drove up toward Svanemøllen Station.

  She couldn’t help laughing when he grimaced.

  “Three weeks, Flemming!” he parodied in a falsetto voice. “That’s how long they’re gonna be with me before we go back to the regular schedule!”

  Louise shook her head. She’d never met the medical examiner’s ex-wife and had a hard time understanding how grown people could keep their children from each other after they’d gotten divorced.

  “But she must think it’s great that her boys got to go on such a wonderful trip.”

  “I think she does. It just should have been with her. But in three weeks we’ll hopefully be back on level terms, and I’ll get to see them.”

  “When can children decide for themselves where they’d like to be?” Louise asked.

  She kept her eye on a cyclist who was attempting a hazardous passing maneuver around a Christiania cargo bike. For a second she thought he was going to hit the Passat’s side-view mirror, but he managed to straighten out.

  “When they’re around twelve, I think. The boys are nine and eleven, but I’m not allowed to have them more often than I do. It would just be nice if things could be a little more flexible.”

  Louise nodded. It suddenly occurred to her what a great gift it was for Jonas to have Melvin Pehrsson living just below them.

  “Why don’t you come up and eat with us?” she asked as they got closer to Frederiksberg. “I’ve got everything prepped, it just needs to be cooked. Then you can meet our downstairs neighbor. You’d like him.”

  Flemming accepted at once, even though he was on call until seven o’clock the next morning.

  “I’ll just have to take off if I get a call,” he said and insisted that she let him buy wine to go with the dinner.

  He glanced in his rearview mirror before merging into the middle lane. Instead of turning onto Gammel Kongevej, he kept going straight toward Frederiksberg Allé, where he swung in and parked illegally in front of a wine store that was about to take up its sidewalk signs and close for the day.

  Louise stayed in the car.

  He came back with the wine wrapped up in tissue paper.

  “Fancy what a bottle of wine does for a weekday,” he said. “However, it is a nice one.”

  Louise didn’t doubt it, maybe a bit of an overkill to go with her meat sauce. But she’d pegged Flemming Larsen for a wine connoisseur long ago.

  They’d just parked in front of her entrance when Michael Stig called on her cell phone.

  Flemming held the door for her. She gave him the keys and lagged as they climbed up to the fourth floor.

  “Designer furniture. Fake, the whole shit-lot of it,” said Michael Stig.

  He and Toft had just gotten back from the warehouse out on South Pier.

  “There was the Egg Chair and the Swan, a great number of them. And furniture from several of the other big-name furniture designers: Kjærholm, Wegner, Eames, Le Corbusier.”

  It didn’t surprise Louise that her style-conscious colleague knew all the names.

  “Nothing but classic furniture and lamps, which are easy to get rid of,” he said.

  She stopped and leaned against the grayish wall of the entryway as he spoke.

  “At any rate, we’re guessing they’re fakes,” Michael Stig said. “They were wrapped in plastic, but there wasn’t any original packaging or other distinguishing marks. Toft is getting hold of an expert from Bruun Rasmussen or someone in the know at Danish Furniture Industry who can hopefully tell us if we’re looking at fakes or the genuine article. But those people have probably gone home for the day.”

  “So, it was pirated furniture he was up to,” she said, surprised.

  As she walked up the stairs, she told him that Hartmann’s own home was decked out with Piet Hein and Panton lamps, designer furniture, and a Bang & Olufsen stereo system.

  “But maybe they were fakes, too,” she added, well aware that she couldn’t necessarily tell the difference.

  “The furniture is being seized and picked up tomorrow, so we can do an inventory of what he had on hand,” said Michael Stig.

  Louise could hear that Flemming had already let himself in. She suggested to her colleague that he call Mikkelsen down at City Station and tell him what Nick Hartmann had been busy with. They’d troubled their colleague with a trip around the brothels, but now he could get that out of his head.

  “I don’t understand how people can be so vulgar,” Michael Stig said in a tone of outrage. “How tasteless to go and buy a fake Arne Jacobsen and have a replica of the Egg Chair sitting in your living room when you know it was made by little Juan, who made at most a half-krone an hour.”

  “People don’t give a shit!” exclaimed Louise and laughed at his indignation. “Most people take what they can get. Especially if it’ll save them money.”

  But Michael Stig kept on with his sarcasm. Although she’d never seen where her colleague lived, she had a feeling that it was probably a little more stylish than her place. Some of his good taste could be in jeopardy if he’d taken home too many of the bowling trophies he and Toft shoveled in from the many tournaments they’d won for the Police Sports Association.

  “Is there anything we should do tonight, because I could make it in,” she said.

  She stopped on the third floor to let Jonas and Melvin know they’d be eating in half an hour.

  “No, we’ll carry on tomorrow,” said Michael Stig. “There’s really not much we can do now. I’ve called Sejr. In his department, they’ve had lots of cases like this, and as far as I could tell they have a good relationship with the tax authorities at SKAT and the leader of the task force set up to fight pirating. We’ll just have a hard time sloughing the case off on them, as long as we have an ongoing murder investigation.”

  * * *

  A half hour later, steam rose as Louise poured spaghetti into the colander. Flemming found hot pads and called in Jonas and Melvin from Jonas’s room, where they sat in front of the computer. The boy was in the process of demonstrating how Alliance and Horde fought each other in World of Warcraft. It was apparently his turn to be the teacher.

  “It’s incredible what young people know,” exclaimed Melvin, impressed as he came into the kitchen and accepted the glass of wine from Flemming Larsen. “When I was a kid, we had some little tin soldiers that we set up in rows and shot down with wooden cannons.”

  He laughed and pulled out his chair carefully, so it w
ouldn’t scrape the floor. The tips of his shirt collar were arranged neatly over the outside of his knitted vest, and he smiled a little sheepishly when he unfolded the paper napkin and tucked it under his neck like a bib.

  “I’ve gotten so bad about spilling,” he apologized, and Louise suddenly remembered how she’d met him several times rolling a little wheelie bag from the Laundromat up on Gammel Kongevej.

  When the pasta was eaten up, the three generations of men talked so eagerly over the table that Louise had a hard time taking part in the conversation, which was currently centered on a small village in southeast Greenland where both Melvin and Flemming had been several times. The same town was the setting for an essay Jonas had just turned in about a whaler from Kulusuk—strongly inspired by Melvin’s stories.

  They spoke on top of each other. Described and held forth.

  Smiling, she stood and started to clean up.

  * * *

  Late in the evening, the sofa table was littered with chocolate wrappers from the big box of Quality Street, which Melvin Pehrsson had brought to have with coffee, and which they’d nearly emptied while he told them about the years he’d lived in Australia and about his daughter, Jette, who still lived in a city outside Melbourne with her husband and three children. Not that he saw much of them. He’d been there once since Nancy died, and when she was still alive he hadn’t wanted to be away from her, so he’d only seen his grandchildren that one time. Jette, however, had been home twice to visit her father, and she’d also flown home for the funeral. But money was tight, so now their contact with each other was down to two phone calls a month.

  That made Jonas sit up.

  “You should get Skype on your computer,” he exclaimed in his hoarse voice and began eagerly explaining how you could use your computer to call anywhere in the world completely free.

  Melvin Pehrsson had looked confused until Flemming came to his rescue by drawing two computers, each with its own little webcam, that communicated with each other over the Internet.