The Lost Woman

by Sara Blaedel

  “I’m reasonably sure he was hiding in the bushes out there.” Davies pointed. “That’s where we found the footprints. And if he drove here, he could have parked where we did. But no one else living here noticed a strange car, so more likely he parked up behind Battleaxe, the pub we passed on the way. Their restaurant is popular, it’s filled almost every evening, and often cars are parked on the road out front. But there are no surveillance cameras, so we haven’t been able to track him that way.”

  Place mats lay on the dining room table, along with a pack of unopened paper napkins. A short black leather jacket hung over one chair. A calendar had been put up on the refrigerator, along with a few shopping lists, and a row of cookbooks filled a shelf on the wall bordering the living room. A metallic odor and a faint hint of chlorine hung in the air.

  “Is it possible to borrow a picture of her to show my colleague, so he can identify her?” Louise asked. She followed him into the living room. She noted a white velour sofa group, a flat-screen TV, and another dining table with high-backed chairs by the covered patio.

  “Maybe up in her office,” Davies said, on the way to the stairway in the hall. “She kept the books for her husband’s business.”

  Louise glanced around to gain some final impressions. Reproductions of Picassos and small, framed lithographs hung on the walls. The house was decorated in a light style, not particularly Scandinavian. Nor was it particularly English. It was more whitewashed, French, and romantic. A three-arm candlestick holder stood on a buffet, and potted plants stuck in outer pots had been placed on the windowsills. Everything was nice and impersonal, more like a false front. Though that is probably unfair, Louise thought. A home can look nice and tidy if the person taking care of it doesn’t have a full-time job.

  She followed Davies up the stairs. There were four doors on the landing, and he opened the one leading into the office. A desk nearly filled one wall. Louise glanced inside a bedroom with a double bed covered by a patterned bedspread. A large wardrobe stood along a wall, opposite a low secretary pushed into the corner, over which hung a teak-framed mirror. Louise then checked the next room: a large bathroom with a bathtub.

  The daughter’s room was at the end of the landing. Louise opened the door to what resembled a bomb crater. Apparently the daughter wasn’t so different from most teenagers. Clothes—black clothes dotted with studs, scarves, and thick-heeled Dr. Martens boots—lay scattered on the bed, the floor, and a dresser beside the desk. Posters of bands Louise had never heard of hung on the walls.

  It reminded her of Jonas. She wondered if his room at boarding school was as chaotic as this one. Most likely. Unless they had rules against such things.

  “I think we can use this,” Davies said from the office. Louise closed the door to the adolescent cave behind her.

  He was holding a photograph of Sofie Parker smiling in a lawn chair, wearing a white summer top. Her hair was pinned up behind her head; her eyes looked directly at the camera.

  “Summer, 2013, it says on the back,” he said. He waited.

  Louise’s stomach sank; she felt a sudden and enormous aversion to the smiling woman. Sofie Parker was a few years older than Louise, but even though she looked carefree and happy in the photo, her expression revealed a seriousness seen in women who had grown up early. She was beautiful and at ease with herself, and it wasn’t difficult to see that she was a good match for Eik.

  “Fine,” she said. She handed the photo back. “What else have you found in here?”

  The office had obviously been searched. Everything was piled up, systematically checked, in a way a person working there never would arrange things.

  Davies stood beside the door, pointing to a wastebasket beside the desk. “The brown wrapping paper from two packages sent from Mexico were found in there. They were postmarked Cozumel. We’re examining them now to trace the sender. Apparently the husband knows nothing about this, and it could be anything bought online.”

  The front door below opened and a man’s voice called out. Davies yelled that they were upstairs, and he started down the steps. Louise stayed behind, studying the desk and the piles made by the English police. Photos of the daughter when she was a young child hung from the bulletin board. She couldn’t have been more than two years old in one of them, leaning against a stroller in front of a large lake with mountains in the background. Another photo showed her with a school backpack, smiling toothlessly at the camera.

  She took the picture Davies had found. She had no desire whatsoever to be the one who showed it to Eik.

  It was like stepping into a paused film when she entered the living room. The husband, a large man with short, blond hair, stood by the kitchen door holding his mail, absorbed in hushed conversation with Davies. His back was to his daughter, who stood by the dining room table with her phone. She looked furious. It was impossible not to sense the tension between father and daughter. Nothing was spoken; it simply filled the room.

  Louise walked over to her. “Hello,” she said, introducing herself. “I’m from Copenhagen Police. What’s your name?”

  “Steph.” The girl glanced up. Her black hair fell in her eyes. “It’s only him over there who still insists on calling me Stephanie. I hate that name.”

  The girl was pale and dismissive. She wore heavy eyeliner and green fingernail polish, and a small sparkling stone in her nose.

  Davies called Louise over. She shook the widower’s hand, then offered her condolences and explained that she worked in the Danish Search Department, which had investigated the disappearance of his wife.

  “It’s news to me that my wife had been missing,” he said, as if he weren’t convinced it was true. “Of course, I knew she was Danish, but she seldom talked about her past. And I respected her wish to put it behind her.”

  He looked like a man who hadn’t slept much lately. He turned the broad wedding ring on his left ring finger as he spoke.

  “This just arrived in the mail,” Davies said. He handed Louise a letter from a Swiss bank.

  Nigel Parker had tossed the rest of the mail on the kitchen table. A few advertisements, a local paper, a birthday invitation. “I don’t understand it. The account is in my wife’s name, but there must be some mistake. We have no dealings with a bank in Zurich.”

  Steph stared at her phone again, as if she weren’t listening. Her father took out his reading glasses from his pocket. Confused, he glanced back and forth between Davies and Louise. “There’s almost eighty-eight thousand euros in the account.”

  “The postings have been made over a long period of time; the account can’t be new,” Davies said. “May I take this with me?”

  Suddenly Steph ran out of the room, and shortly after a door upstairs slammed.

  Parker seemed to ignore his daughter’s behavior and nodded. “Of course.” His voice was thick. “But my wife never mentioned a foreign bank account.”

  He explained that they had banked at Barclays in Bristol since moving to town. “We’ve always used the same bank.”

  “We’ll look into it,” Davies replied.

  Parker seemed confused, on the edge of tears. His hands shook as he folded his glasses and hung them in the V-neck of his sweater.

  Davies pulled out a chair and guided him into it. Louise gestured that she was going upstairs to talk to the daughter.

  “Swiss banks aren’t wild about giving access to their accounts,” Davies said, as Louise walked up the steps. “But, of course, we’ll set the wheels in motion at once.”

  Louise knocked on the girl’s bedroom door before opening it. Steph lay on her bed, face buried in the mattress. “May I come in?”

  “Mmmm.” Her voice was muffled, but she turned over and sat up.

  “It must be difficult, with all these questions being asked.” Louise moved the clothes draped over the chair and sat down.

  “I can bloody well understand if Mum were seeing someone else,” she said, angry now. “That idiot down there was never interested in her
. He’s always at the store.”

  The girl stared straight ahead, her expression filled with sorrow and pain. She kicked the boots lying on the bed and sat with her back against the wall.

  After a moment, Louise asked, “Do you know what your mother ordered from Mexico?”

  Steph shook her head without looking at Louise.

  “Does she usually shop online?”

  The girl shrugged. “It might be something for the store. Sometimes things get sent here instead. I don’t know, I don’t have anything to do with it. But Mum always checked the mail. She ran the office.”

  Another pause. The girl’s eyes were blank, her face as closed as a fist.

  Louise knew the girl might shut her out completely, but she decided to fish around. “Did your parents quarrel?”

  Steph shook her head. “He and I are the only ones that quarrel. He doesn’t like me, and I don’t care because I don’t like him either.” Now she looked at Louise. “So you’re from Denmark. Like Mum.”

  Louise nodded and smiled. “Have you been there?”

  “No. But Mum had plans for us to visit. That’s not going to happen now.” She began to cry. She swiped angrily at her tears, leaving black streaks across her face.

  “Did you ever go along when your mother went to London?”

  The daughter’s expression turned defiant as she shook her head again. “She went there when she needed to get away from him. She always said she had to shop there because Nailsea was such a dump. And she had a hairdresser in London; she wanted her hair to look decent, she said. But she never bought anything for herself when she was there, only clothes for me and tea and Stilton cheese from Fortnum and Mason. She would much rather live in London, but he didn’t want to.”

  Louise wanted so much to hug the young girl and take her back to Copenhagen with her.

  She hadn’t heard Davies come up the stairs, but now he stood at the door. “I’m ready to leave.” He stepped inside the room. “I’ve spoken with your father, and we’ve agreed that you and I can talk when you come home from school tomorrow. It’s important that you think about this. You might have seen something anyway. It’s completely normal to not remember much at first, after such a shock, but details often come back after a few days.”

  The girl turned to the window. Louise sensed that the questioning would be difficult; Davies didn’t realize he should have set things up with the girl, not her father. She weighed whether to get involved, but decided against it. She told Steph to call her if she ever wanted to come to Copenhagen. That she would like to show her around.

  She laid her card on the desk and smiled at her one last time before following Davies down the stairs.

  10

  Eik was holding a coffee cup between his hands when they got back to the Nailsea Police Station. Louise noticed that he started to stand up when she came in, but then he thought better of it. His eyes were red and glazed. A thousand thoughts ran through her head, but instead of speaking she laid a hand on his shoulder before leaning over the table for the mug Jones handed her.

  “When did you get here?” he asked, when she sat down. The two English officers talked about the bank statement sent to Sofie Parker. As Louise understood it, one of the policemen on the case had been assigned to gather information on the foreign bank account.

  “Around three, and we have a ten thirty flight home to catch.” That wasn’t up for discussion. “We’ve just been out at the house. The husband and daughter arrived while we were there.”

  Jones and Davies sat down across from Louise and Eik. “Nordstrøm and I have already gone over the preliminaries,” the policewoman said. “I have the information, and I’ve confirmed what Officer Rick explained about Nordstrøm’s job situation.”

  “But before we go further,” Davies said, “if you would please have a look at the photo of the deceased. Just so we’re sure this is the Danish woman reported missing.”

  Louise sat up and blocked off all the emotions roiling inside her. She pulled out the photo and laid it on the table in front of Eik.

  The expression that flashed across his face was almost invisible. He nodded without touching the photo, confirming that this was the Sofie Bygmann he had sailed with in the Mediterranean, the woman he had reported missing after she disappeared from the boat in a harbor town outside Rome.

  No one spoke for a moment. Louise was worried about how vulnerable he looked, and she couldn’t quite read his expression as he gazed at the photo. It wasn’t sorrow, or shock from her suddenly showing up after so many years. Had that been the case, he would have picked the photo up and studied it closely. Held it in his hands. His face showed more distance, or perhaps closure.

  “We argued on the boat that morning when she woke me,” Eik began. “Sofie had already gathered all her dirty clothes, and she wanted to find a Laundromat at the harbor. But I felt like walking into town to see the old ruins, so I said why not just rinse our clothes out whenever we needed them.”

  He leaned back into the hard wooden chair, looking like someone who needed a bath and a cigarette. “So things were a bit tense. I got annoyed and I went into town for a cup of coffee. The two others were still asleep.”

  “Who were the two others?” Davies asked. He sat at a computer, writing down Eik’s explanation, which was more a window into what had happened back then than an actual witness statement.

  “Two young guys: Christopher and Mark. They owned the boat. Or actually, it was Christopher’s father who owned it, but they were sailing around on vacation that summer. We met them on Corsica, we had a fun evening together. They had some weed, we smoked some, and then they let us come along. They were on their way to Italy, then south to Capri, where someone had a house they were going to stay in.”

  “Were they the ones who drowned?” Louise asked. Eik nodded.

  “Did anyone find out exactly what happened?” Jones asked. “There’s nothing about it in Sofie Bygmann’s search report.”

  Eik shook his head. “There are lots of theories. The craziest one was that it was a hate crime because they were gay. When the boat was found drifting around outside the harbor, the bodies were only a few meters away. The police found evidence that someone tried to steal the boat, but the ignition had some sort of thief protection and they couldn’t start the motor. So maybe they just gave up. Or they were surprised by Christopher and Mark; there could have been a fight. They could have been assaulted while they were asleep; the killers could have stolen stuff from them and tossed them overboard. The police never found out what happened.”

  He slumped a bit. “When I heard about it, I was thinking mostly that Sofie’s things weren’t found on the boat, and I was afraid she’d disappeared with the criminals. Either of her own free will or by force. But she could have drowned and floated away from the others. I never understood why her things were gone.”

  “Was that the last time you saw her, when you left the boat that morning?” Jones asked.

  Eik shook his head. “I went into town and drank a coffee and cooled down. I started talking to some kids sitting at a fountain playing music. One of them had a guitar. It looked like they’d been there all night. We smoked a joint, and then Sofie showed up, and I asked her to join us. But she was still looking for a Laundromat, the one at the harbor was closed. She had a shopping list, too.”

  It pained Louise to hear that what had happened so many years ago stood so fresh in his memory.

  “She kept on about all the practical stuff we had to get done, and that irritated me even more. The weather was fantastic, we were having a great time, and I still wanted to see those ruins. Mark had been there; he said it was something you had to see, and Sofie had agreed right up until then, but suddenly there wasn’t enough time, she wanted to wash clothes and do the shopping.”

  He paused a second as if to calm himself down. “I didn’t want to listen to her anymore, so I stuck around there. But when I got back to the harbor a few hours later the boat was gone. With my back
pack and all my clothes. I had my wallet and passport on me, but everything else was gone.”

  He looked over at Jones. “I was so mad that I decided to hitchhike to Rome. I got drunk, then I went back the next day. I thought they’d come back for me.”

  He stared down at the table. Louise sat bolt upright; he hadn’t looked at her once while speaking.

  “But they didn’t,” he said. “Maybe she grabbed her things and left, too. I just don’t know! My backpack was still on board when they found the boat. That’s why the police contacted me.”

  “So that’s the last time you saw her?” Davies asked from over at the computer.

  Eik nodded. “I thought of every possibility. She drowned, she was kidnapped and sold. She was with whoever tried to steal the boat. Or Mark and Christopher tried to defend her from whoever killed them. At one point, I thought I was going crazy from thinking. And now, eighteen years later, out of the blue I get a call from you.”

  He looked back at the policewoman. “And you tell me she’s dead.” He ran his hand through his dark, shiny hair. “She’s been living here all these years, while I spent so much time thinking about what happened back then.”

  The silence was heavy. Louise was torn between her role as Eik’s boss and colleague, and a chilling fear that this would come between them. That she would lose him. Part of her felt sorry for him, part of her was angry, but also, in a way, she was relieved that he finally had his answer.

  “When did you arrive here at Nailsea?” Davies said. The unhappy love story didn’t seem to have affected him. “Try to be as accurate as possible with the times.”

  Eik turned in his chair to face the officer behind the computer screen. “I landed at two ten p.m. and took a taxi from the airport. I have my plane ticket, you can look at it.” His fingers still held the coffee cup, even though it was empty. “Maybe your people were home for afternoon tea, I don’t know, but no one was at the house when I arrived. It wasn’t hard to find, there were barriers everywhere, and I knew the name of the town from when I was called.”