The Running Girl

by Sara Blaedel

  Louise nodded and mumbled that you could certainly say that.

  “And that kind of gambling fits very well with his interest in extreme sports. Isn’t it paragliding and that sort of thing you said he does?”

  She nodded again.

  “That type of person is attracted to the thrill of pushing himself all the way over the edge, and you can do that in several ways,” he added and straightened his cap a bit so the light from Louise’s desk lamp wouldn’t shine in his eyes.

  “Have you found anything that ties Ulrik with Hartmann or the boys in the boathouse?”

  “Not directly. There haven’t been any money transfers between Nick Hartmann and Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen except for the rent, which was paid every month,” he said. “And that went into the completely normal business account.”

  He held back a little before his smile grew bigger and he added, “But in the beginning of July there was a transfer of 660,000 dollars to Yang, Inc. in Hong Kong from the account on the Isle of Man.”

  “Holy shit!” exclaimed Louise and leaned forward excitedly.

  The water boiled, but she ignored it.

  She saw clearly the contours of the double life Ulrik had going, and that he seemed to be more of a smooth operator than she’d been capable of seeing at first.

  “With that transfer, can we be sure that it was him who paid for the second container?” she asked dubiously, suddenly nervous that everything could fall apart again.

  “I think so,” Sejr said, warding off her worries. “I have Hartmann’s business folders and papers here, but there’s nothing for the extra container. Only for the one he had delivered last time, and the earlier deliveries he received. But on the freight paper both containers are entered with numbers, so I’ve written to the office in Hong Kong to have them pull the invoices. We need to confirm that the money that was transferred from the British bank was payment for the specific container number. And when we have that, then the trap’s closed.”

  The picture was now quite clear. Ulrik and Hartmann had known each other from Ulrik’s courses. Hartmann had presumably gotten greedy and wanted to run import alongside the business he had going with the bikers. But he didn’t have enough capital for investing, and that’s when he turned to Ulrik. He had plenty of capital and was more than happy to see his money multiply.

  There was a knock on the door, and Willumsen came in.

  “People are a hell of a lot dumber than you’d think!” he said with a certain enthusiasm and closed the door behind him. “That apprentice-mechanic idiot definitely was out in Værløse getting parts for his supervisor, but he also took a little side trip up to North Zealand with a child’s bed.”

  He sat down on a bureau inside the door and clapped his hands together.

  “The fool forgot about the packaging from a set of baby sheets and the receipt from BabySam on Roskildevej. All of it was lying in the back of the garage’s box van.”

  Willumsen slapped himself on the forehead.

  “Oh, my God! If the criminal mind is in such rapid decline, then there’s some damn hope for us in the future.”

  Louise grinned and shook her head, then stood up to pour water over her tea bag.

  “That’s a relief for Mie,” she said.

  She offered the lead investigator a cup of tea and pointed to the bakery bag.

  Willumsen declined the tea, but looked over at the cola Sejr had on the desk.

  “You’re welcome to take one,” the fraud investigator said and pointed to the refrigerator.

  “How about the arrestees?” asked Louise. “Are they still not saying who ordered or paid for the job?”

  Willumsen shook his head and twisted the cap off his half-liter cola.

  “They’re saying nothing. And we probably won’t get them to, either. That’s biker rule number one, and if they break it they’ll be targeted the whole time they sit in the slammer. A couple of goons like them know that much.”

  “Yes,” said Louise, knowing he was right.

  “The problem with these damned biker assholes is that they never get their hands dirty,” he said.

  He took a gulp from the bottle and opened the bakery bag, fishing out a pastry.

  “They’re uncanny about avoiding the fall when one of their businesses goes bad.”

  The lead investigator took a big bite of his pastry.

  Louise nodded thoughtfully.

  “It probably wasn’t all that difficult for the bikers to see what Hartmann was up to when he suddenly went off on his solo ride,” she said. “They would have been bat-shit angry, and wouldn’t have wanted to be cheated like that. And so, they got their trainees to put a stop to him.”

  “In a way, that’s what Thim and Thomas Jørgensen have already confessed to,” the lead investigator said. “They just won’t cough up the names of the ones who were behind it. And maybe they don’t even know them,” he said, brushing crumbs off his pullover. “After all, it was Nymann who was the primary contact and got paid for the killing.”

  “I’d like to know if a new team’s being sent after Mie, now that Thim and Thomas Jørgensen are sitting behind bars,” Louise said.

  She dove into the bag herself and broke a pastry in two.

  Willumsen shook his head.

  “Actually, I don’t think so. They might make big, bad threats, but usually nothing happens when there are witnesses against the bikers. It’s extremely seldom that there are revenge attacks afterward. And they know we’re onto them. The bikers got those two to take a test, and they got nothing out of it. Now it’s too dangerous to do more.”

  Louise nodded and thought he was probably right.

  “But what the hell are we doing with this stuff?” asked Willumsen. “We need to get the father in, so he and the wife can each have their own cell out at Vestre. They’re one hell of a nice married couple.”

  Sejr pulled his chair over to the corner of the desk, so he sat facing Willumsen.

  “What we’re doing with this stuff is, Rick and I are going through everything there is on Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen, so we’re well-armed when we pull him in,” he said.

  He gave a rare smile.

  “And you can go in to the lieutenant and tell him there’s a rather considerable offshoot that’s come up in connection with the investigation of the fire and the Hartmann shooting. If these things hadn’t fallen together, then Fasting-Thomsen could have kept on living his double life, free and clear, until the day he decided to leave his wife and head out of the country with his lover, or a new one like her.”

  “Yup, the whole thing’s been damned unlucky for him,” Willumsen said happily.

  He thanked them for the soft drink and pastry.

  “If you can make it, then come to the morning meeting. But it’s more important that you take care of this stuff, so we can get our claws in him.”

  He hummed contentedly as he left the office.

  52

  What’ll happen to all the money Ulrik has stashed?” Louise asked when they were alone.

  “It’ll be seized. He’ll be tossed in and do some years in prison, and he’ll pay a big fine. But then he’ll be let out and will probably be fit for fight and start some new business ventures.”

  Sejr shook his head as if he had a hard time taking it very seriously.

  “Like all the other financial geniuses who just needed to test how far they could push the boundaries. They turn up again and start in where they left off.”

  He started to sort the new piles of paper in front of him on his desk.

  “Would you start by running through these?”

  He pushed a big stack across the desk. Eleven years of bank statements from Ulrik’s foreign account that Sejr had had unofficially printed out.

  “It appears that this is the foreign account he used for private expenditures whenever he was abroad, so you can practically follow his movements. And it’s a feast of hotels and restaurant visits that were probably a tad too private to figure into his leg
al business account.”

  He smiled.

  “And then there are the large deposits and withdrawals, but I haven’t gone through any of it very thoroughly yet. Take a look through while I try to see if any of it can be related to his Danish business accounts. If any black money was involved there, then we can get him for it.”

  Louise stood and walked out to fill the kettle. She prepared for hours with numbers and columns, which wasn’t exactly what interested her most. But at the same time, her dislike of Ulrik had risen to the point where she wanted everything on him before they drove out and made the arrest.

  “He set his lover up with an apartment he pays for,” she said when she came back with a full kettle. “And I think, too, that he’s transferred money to her every month. That was part of the idea: that she wouldn’t work so she’d be at his disposal.”

  She thought about Britt, who’d taken care of their daughter at home and formed the secure frame around the family life he hadn’t been willing to give up.

  Louise snorted, and Sejr tore himself away from his screens for a moment and looked at her.

  Louise shook her head. She’d just happened to speak out loud.

  He wanted everything, she thought. Completely over the edge, like when he threw himself off a cliff with a parachute tied to his back.

  “I think he owns that property out on Strand Boulevard,” Sejr said and looked at her again. “So, she was probably living there rent-free. But he may have set up an automatic monthly transfer to her from the account you’re sitting with.”

  He nodded at Louise’s papers.

  They sat in silence, reading numbers and taking notes. There was only a single time when a $660,000 amount was taken out. Louise checked the dates on the freight papers in Hartmann’s files, but there weren’t any other transfers from Ulrik’s hidden account that matched with the deliveries. Each month, on the other hand, 15,000 kroner was transferred to the same account number.

  “Could that be Vigdís Ólafsdóttir?” Louise asked and looked over at Sejr.

  He asked her to read the recipient’s account number. She heard his fingers on the keys, and shortly after he nodded.

  “At any rate, it’s an account in Danske Bank down on Østerbrogade, so it very well could be hers.”

  Louise marked all the payments to the lover’s account in red. There was another transfer to the same bank, but to a different account number. On April 29, 50,000 kroner was transferred. But whereas the transfer of fifteen thousand occurred every month and had done so over eight years, the larger sum of fifty thousand was only repeated one time a year.

  She got her computer going and waited patiently for her password to be accepted. Then she pulled up the Central Registry of Persons and inserted the code that gave the police direct access to name information and data.

  “Vigdís Ólafsdóttir” she wrote in the search field, and a moment later her name and address appeared.

  Born October 2, 1975. Then the fifty thousand couldn’t have been a birthday present. Vigdís had moved her registered address to Denmark in 2001 and lived on Strand Boulevard ever since.

  From the information, Louise could see that she’d also lived in Denmark earlier. For two years. That might be in connection with studies, she thought. Her age certainly fit. She’d been around eighteen–nineteen at that time, but then she’d gone home again.

  At the bottom, it said, “Children: Jón Vigdísarson, born April 29, 1992; Father: unknown.”

  Louise slammed her hands on the desk, harder than she’d meant to. The palms of her hands sweated, and Sejr looked over at her, startled. He was so occupied by all his numbers that for once he wasn’t listening to music.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s money he transfers to Jón every year on his birthday. It adds up to 400,000 kroner so far.”

  “Well, what d’ya know!” Sejr exclaimed, then looked at her speculatively. “Why the hell does he do that? The kid couldn’t have been a criminal going so damned far back, could he?”

  “I think Ulrik’s the boy’s father,” Louise said.

  She heard a knock on her door, and when she looked up she saw Lars Jørgensen sticking his head in.

  The morning meeting must be over, and she hadn’t even known he’d attended it.

  She jumped out of her chair and gave him a hug.

  “Do you have time to drive to Østerbro with me?” she asked when she’d let go of him.

  He looked at her, caught off guard, then walked over and shook hands with Sejr before checking his watch.

  “Yes,” he said. “I could manage that. I promised Willumsen I’d take a walk with the widow and her little girl, so we look like a nuclear family out for a stroll. As if that would attract less attention!” he said and added with a smile that it was mostly women who went on afternoon walks with their children when they were home on maternity leave. The men, of course, had to work. “But if it makes them feel more secure to have me with them, then I’m happy to do it.”

  “Do you have a car down there?” she asked and started walking down the hall, too occupied with leaving to fill him in on things.

  * * *

  It was Lars Jørgensen who drove, and Louise gave him an update on Fasting-Thomsen as they crossed the streets of Copenhagen and turned down past Østerport Station. They drove along the tracks and before they reached the bridge to Langelinje quay, he got over in the left lane and swung onto Strand Boulevard.

  “It doesn’t sound like he and the boy had a very close relationship,” Lars Jørgensen said after she’d told him about her visit with Vigdís.

  Louise sat observing him while he drove. The two of them had been partners for the last five years, and she’d gradually started to fear that he wouldn’t be coming back to the department. But thank God, she thought, and confessed to herself that she must still be addicted to a sense of security.

  “It’s not even for certain that the boy knows that Ulrik’s his father,” she said. “And if he does know it, then I can damn well understand if he feels let down and would rather move back to Iceland with his mother. Because that suggests his father hasn’t ever really been there for him.”

  It made her angry to think that someone could renounce his parental responsibility like that.

  “It’s only now that Ulrik’s been ready to sign on full-time, because now he no longer has his other family,” she added. “So now all of a sudden, there’s room for Vigdís and her son. Jón’s mother said that Ulrik has offered to pay for his education and get him an apartment.”

  “Think how she’s put up with that,” Lars Jørgensen mumbled and parked in front of the entrance, a little too close to the corner to avoid getting a ticket if an attendant came by. “There’s probably not that many kept women around anymore, now that they’d all rather take care of themselves.”

  There was a bitter undertone in his words, but Louise didn’t have the energy to ask questions.

  “Now we’ll get Vigdís to tell us all about the man,” she said, standing on the sidewalk. “I consider him to be just as twisted and cynical as the boys who shot Nick Hartmann. Ulrik’s façade of respectability just makes it all the more terrible.”

  A paper boy came out, and they went in. On their way up the stairs, Louise told him about Britt, who had never tried to defend herself against the serious charges that had been raised against her, but instead directed her thanks to the goddess of vengeance, who she thought stood by her.

  When they reached the fourth floor, the door to the apartment was ajar. Louise put a hand on her partner’s arm and stopped him before he got his finger on the doorbell. A faint moan, which sounded more like an animal than a human, had made her react.

  They waited a moment before she carefully pushed open the door.

  The dining table was straight ahead, and in a chair with her back to them sat Vigdís with her legs tucked up and her head hidden between her knees, slowly rocking back and forth and moaning.

  On the floor over
by the balcony door, there was shattered glass from the vase in the windowsill, broken flowers in a sea of water. They stepped into the room, and the curtain in front of the French balcony fluttered.

  The blood had drawn a path across the shiny parquet floor and still ran from her face, as if her nose bled.

  Louise called her name and walked forward.

  Vigdís was wearing the same white sweater. She must have lain on the floor, Louise thought, because she was spattered with blood on the left side of her back and her sleeve. She didn’t react to the voice behind her, but continued to hug herself and rock back and forth.

  Except for the pitiful moaning, everything in the apartment was completely quiet.

  Lars Jørgensen had already gone into the living room and now pushed open the door to Jón’s room, but shook his head when he saw that it was empty.

  It looked like the fight had only taken place in the large kitchen. Several things were on the floor, the table was pushed askew, and chairs toppled. It was like stepping into the aftermath of a drama that had played itself out.

  Louise walked over and put her hand on Vigdís’s shoulder, then crouched down beside her.

  “What happened?” she asked quietly.

  The Icelandic woman just kept rocking back and forth. Louise tried to remove her hands so she could see her face. The blood ran, and Lars Jørgensen came over from the kitchen sink with a hand towel that Louise passed her.

  It seemed as though Vigdís Ólafsdóttir had gone into shock. The small, wheezing animal noises made Louise’s hair stand up as she leaned forward to study the gash over her eyebrow and nose, which looked like it might be broken. But it didn’t seem to be the injuries to her face that Jón’s mother was whimpering about. It was something else, as if something inside her had fallen apart. As if she’d barricaded herself against reality.

  Louise gently shook the Icelandic woman’s shoulder.