The Lost Woman

by Sara Blaedel

  She had always been in doubt. She regretted not telling her daughter long ago that Nigel Parker wasn’t her biological father. It would have made it easier for Sofie to let Steph in on the reason for her decision. On the other hand, she hadn’t thought her daughter needed to know until she was older, even older than now, at an age when she might be able to understand.

  Sofie walked over and sat down on the sofa. She reached for her daughter’s hand and decided to wing it. “I left Denmark many years ago, right after your grandmother died. I wanted to travel around Europe for the summer. Just ramble around, no definite plans. I needed to get away, get some distance from my mother’s death. Something happens when you find yourself alone, all your family gone. And I had to figure out how to deal with that.”

  For a moment she considered telling her daughter about Stig and the marriage she had abandoned. But that could wait. Right now this was more important. “I wanted to go to several places in France, and I also dreamed about seeing the Amalfi Coast and Rome. But before I got that far, I ran into a guy at the train station in Zurich. We’d been on the same train from Copenhagen, but I didn’t really notice him until we were on the platform. He was helping a mother with two small children haul a baby carriage up the steps, because the elevator was broken.”

  Steph slumped a bit on the sofa. She’d stopped twirling the strands of her scarf, and she let Sofie hold her hand.

  “We started talking, and we both had to find a cheap place to stay, so we decided to stick together. We ended up renting two rooms at an old boarding house. There was no hot water. And there were lice,” she suddenly recalled. They had already kissed that first evening, but she didn’t tell her daughter that. “He was on leave from his job, he was just traveling around, too, wherever his feet took him, so we decided to go to France together.”

  “And you fell in love with him or what?” Steph wasn’t sure where her mother was going with all this.

  “No. But it was the first time I’d traveled alone, and it was nice to follow along with someone who’d done it before.”

  She paused a moment, thinking back. After she’d opened the bank account, they passed through Switzerland to France, where they spent two weeks before boarding a tourist boat to Corsica.

  “One evening we met two guys, Christopher and Mark, at the harbor. We’d already spread out our sleeping pads at the end of a pier, we wanted to sleep surrounded by water, and they’d just sailed in from the mainland. They were having trouble tying up the boat, so we helped. It was typical for him to just start talking to people we met. The next few days we hung around with them. It was fun, and when they were ready to leave, they asked us if we wanted to go along. They were going to Italy, and as I said, I wanted to visit Rome.”

  “And you still weren’t in love with him?” Steph had pulled her hand away without Sofie’s noticing.

  “By then I was.” She folded her hands in her lap. The dark-haired Copenhagener had swept her off her feet. He was so different from the life she had wanted to put behind her.

  “I tried to fight it. I really didn’t need another broken heart, I was already running away from one. But we had a fantastic summer…” She was caught off guard; suddenly she recalled the afternoon they sat on boulders by the sea, eating sandwiches, the smell of the water breaking against the cliffs. The scent of rosemary, the heat. And his body.

  “You were wild about him,” her daughter said matter-of-factly.

  Sofie nodded. “Yes. I was wild about him.”

  “Then why didn’t you stay together? He sounds a lot cooler than the grumpy old creep I have for a father. But I guess if you had, I wouldn’t be here.” She tilted her head.

  Sofie took a deep breath. “Yes you would. You would still be here. He’s your father, but I didn’t know I was expecting when we broke up.”

  The silence was deafening. And long.

  Sofie reached over for her daughter’s hand again, stroked the back of it with her fingers, all the way to her black fingernails. “I didn’t find out until I was three months along. And by that time I was far away.”

  “But why did you break up? Why did you go on alone?”

  “There was something I had to do.” Sofie paused. She had made up her mind to be as honest as possible with her sixteen-year-old daughter about her past. But there still were things she didn’t want to get into, like her time in Switzerland, and why she returned to work at a suicide clinic.

  “I wasn’t ready to commit,” Sofie said, content to leave it at that. “And then when I found out I was expecting you, he was back in Denmark. It was a summer romance, with a bonus for me.”

  She squeezed Steph’s hand.

  “Does he even know I exist?”

  “We haven’t spoken since I left the boat.”

  “When you two split up?”

  “It was time for me to move on. I found out I’d received my inheritance from my mother, so I had to go back to Switzerland and take care of my finances.”

  Steph looked astonished. “So you chose your money over the man you were in love with?”

  “Back then I did, anyway. I’d begun traveling to start a new life. At the time I really needed to be able to take care of myself. Be independent. An adult.”

  “What did he say to your just leaving?”

  “We had an argument on the boat one morning. We’d just tied up at a small fishing village not far from Rome. I wanted to wash clothes, he wanted to sightsee, and I blew up because he wouldn’t help. I knew I’d be moving on anyway, and the argument gave me extra incentive. I found a telephone booth on the way into the village, and I called the bank, like I’d been doing regularly to hear if my money had arrived. And it had.”

  She recalled how it had felt back then, at the telephone on the corner of a small square. Nearby stood a small, dimly lit café and a narrow spit of land with booths, crushed ice for the boxes of fish and shellfish being hauled up from the harbor by shouting men in white aprons. A dewy morning, the sun had yet to peek into the narrow streets winding up the mountainside.

  “I walked around looking for him, to make up. So I could tell him in a decent way I had to leave. But when I finally found him in the town square, he’d been smoking dope, and he was sitting around playing music with a bunch of kids he’d met.”

  He’d been leaning back against the fountain, a guitar on his lap. When he spotted her, he’d waved her over and told the others to make room for her in the circle. She tried to get him to come with her. Said she wanted to talk to him, asked him to get up. But he just sat there, took another hit on the joint being passed around, and soon it seemed he’d forgotten she was even there. They kept playing, and at the sight of him bent over the guitar, his long hair hanging in his eyes, suddenly it was much too difficult for her to say good-bye.

  “I walked back to the boat and packed my things. I felt terrible, and I was still mad at him for going his own way.” She smiled; that was the very thing about him she’d fallen in love with. “I wrote him a note, and then I left.”

  “So you didn’t even say good-bye to each other?”

  Sofie shook her head.

  They sat for a while without speaking.

  Finally Steph asked, “What was he like?”

  “He was everything I didn’t have in the life I’d left behind. He was open-minded, open to life. Reckless, and yet warm. You look a lot like him.” She smiled. “He was beautiful, free, his own man.”

  “Why have you waited so long to tell me this?” Steph’s eyes were moist.

  “I’ve been thinking, maybe we should try to find him. The way things are between you and Nigel, I think it would be good for you to meet your biological father. And you have the right to know that Nigel isn’t your father, even though he’s taken care of you since you were very little.”

  Steph grimaced, but she didn’t say anything.

  Sofie felt it now, sharply: she’d been treading water. Of course, Steph should know who her biological father was. She saw Eik in
her daughter—she, too, went her own way, and Sofie couldn’t bear watching that part of her being slowly swept away by her husband’s irritation.

  “If you want to, if you think it’s a good idea, I’ll try to find him.”

  “Maybe I could live with him?” Steph blurted out.

  “You can visit him anyway, if he decides to answer.”

  “So Nigel isn’t my father at all?” She pulled the long sleeves of her sweater over her hands and rested her chin on her covered palms.

  Sofie shook her head.

  “Does he have other children, my real father?”

  The fact was that Sofie didn’t know. She shrugged. “Probably. He’s forty-two or so. If he was going to have children, he’d probably have them by now.”

  She studied her daughter for a moment, her serious, dark expression. But she also saw curiosity, expectation. “Of course we have to be prepared, he might not know how to deal with finding out he has a daughter.”

  “He might not even believe you when you tell him.”

  Sofie shook her head. “Even though it’s been a long time, I don’t think he’ll react that way. I think he’ll be happy when he hears about it.”

  She tried to sound convincing. Because Eik Nordstrøm had been anything but happy when she had contacted him. She’d probably come off as being pushy and meddlesome, too, but she’d had to know about his life before deciding if she should bring him and his daughter together.

  “I’d like to meet him,” Steph said, her voice small.

  28

  Eik showed up in the doorway unshaven and out of breath, and immediately asked, “Where’s Stephanie?” He looked around.

  “Welcome home,” Louise said, a bit sharply perhaps, but her stomach sank when she stood up. He looked battered and exhausted in his leather jacket and black jeans, his hair hanging down over his eyebrows. But he smiled and walked over to her, put his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her on the forehead.

  “What a hell of an ordeal this has been.”

  He looked at her intently, as if he were forcing his way inside her to check how much damage the past several days had done to them.

  “She’s sitting in here waiting for you,” Louise said, the warmth of his hands still on her shoulders.

  He followed her down the hallway. “How is she? What’s she like?”

  Louise turned to him before they reached the door. “Relax.” In all the time she’d known him, this was the first time he’d seemed nervous. “She’s just identified the man who’s probably our perpetrator. It was a coincidence.”

  She told him about the photo they had been about to send out to every police district. “We thought he was one of the people we had to protect. But Steph says he shot her mother. She reacted very strongly to the photo, so right now we’re trying to find him and bring him in, and we’ll see what he says about being identified by a witness.”

  She paused for a moment. “There’s a distinct possibility he has an alibi. But at least we can eliminate him.”

  “If she says so, it’s him!”

  Louise nodded. “At the very least we have a general description to go on.”

  “She wouldn’t just say something like that!”

  “You haven’t even met her,” Louise pointed out. She smiled when they stopped outside Michael Stig’s office. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

  Toft approached her with a search warrant in his hand. “We’re on our way to Birkerød to search his house.”

  “Let’s talk this evening,” Louise said hurriedly to Eik. “She’s a sweet girl, everything is going to be fine. Come over to my…to our place.” She turned to meet Toft.

  “Hey! Where is she?”

  Louise turned back to Eik, who was standing in the office doorway. “Maybe she’s in the lounge,” she said. “I told her she could grab something to eat or drink.”

  Eik had already ducked into the office, but a few moments later he was out in the hall again. “Come here, there’s something you need to see.”

  He pointed at the copy of the photo of Sørensen and his wife. It lay on the desk, along with the message that had been sent to the police districts. “What the hell is this?”

  The photo had been torn apart in the middle, and only Erik Hald Sørensen remained. Horns had been drawn on his head with a black felt pen, and a target now covered his face. He’d been shot between the eyes with an arrow.

  “It’s the man she identified as killing her mother.”

  Eik stiffened and reached for the photo, but changed his mind and let it lie. “I should’ve insisted on meeting her the second Sofie told me we had a daughter.” He sat down on the desk. “I should’ve made her let me see the girl, but I wasn’t ready, at all. At first I thought someone was fucking with me when I saw the email. All those years without a word from her, and suddenly there she was, in my in-box.”

  Louise had pulled out a chair and was leaning up against its back.

  “I don’t know if you can imagine how crazy it is, being told you have a daughter who’s almost grown up.”

  Louise thought about Jonas, who was a preteen when he had entered her life. She also hadn’t known she was suddenly about to have a child, and the emotions rising up just from the thought of him overwhelmed her. Thinking about Eik’s reaction at hearing he had a daughter, his own flesh and blood, killed off the last traces of her anger toward him.

  “I wrote Sofie that I wanted to come over right then to meet her, but that was too fast for her. She wanted it done the right way, she said, and I flew off the handle. She was hardly the one to talk about doing things the right way. Sixteen years she’d kept Stephanie a secret from me. I had the right to meet her.”

  Louise’s thoughts wandered as Eik talked. What would happen when a sensitive teenager found out she had a different father than she’d thought? One who lived an hour’s flight away. And shortly thereafter, she’d seen her mother being killed. Louise’s fingertips tingled, her nerves twitched in alarm.

  Eik was still talking, but she wasn’t listening. His sixteen-year-old daughter could be a stray missile out there somewhere, seeking its target.

  Even though he was opening up to her about his anger at his ex-girlfriend, the woman who had kept him out of his daughter’s life, Louise interrupted him. “You check the bathrooms, I’ll look for her in the lounge.”

  She was already out the door. She stuck her head into the kitchenette; the dishwasher was beeping, ready to be emptied. She looked everywhere she could think of, then she ran back to her temporary office, grabbed the phone, and called down to the officer guarding the front door to hear if her guest had left Police Headquarters.

  “If she has, she didn’t return her guest pass,” the officer said.

  “Damn it, you’re sitting down there to keep an eye on people!” Louise snapped. She couldn’t help it; she was getting more worried by the moment.

  Back in Stig’s office, she found Eik behind her colleague’s computer. “Did you check the bathrooms?” she said, annoyed at him for not helping.

  “She wasn’t there,” he answered, without looking up. “And if Stephanie’s right, that this man shot her mother, we have to find her before she finds him.”

  “How could she know where to look?” Louise mumbled, mostly to herself. She pressed her fingertips against her temples, as if the small circles she made could help her concentrate. “She doesn’t know where he lives.”

  She tried to remember, had she mentioned the address when she sent a patrol car to Birkerød? Damn it, maybe she had…

  She hurried back to her office and ran into Jørgensen in the doorway just as he was sticking his phone in his pocket. He had his coat on. “Are the patrol cars out there yet?” she asked.

  “They just arrived. Nobody’s there.”

  “Steph is gone, and we don’t know if she’d try to find him.”

  Her old partner looked at her in surprise.

  “Never mind, I’ll explain later. Before you leave, call the
officers out there and tell them to keep an eye out for her. And if she shows up, we need to know immediately. Tell them it’s a young girl, possibly unstable.”

  * * *

  “We have two patrol cars at Sørensen’s home in Birkerød,” she said, when she returned to Stig’s office. “They’ve been told to keep an eye out for Steph, they’ll let us know if she shows up.”

  Eik lifted his hand to stop her. “Try to think like her. We have files, we can check on people, but Stephanie doesn’t have shit. She gets shoved in here to wait. What does she do?”

  “Eik, we don’t have time—”

  “You saw what she did to the photo—come on! She’s upset and angry.”

  “Let’s try to stay calm,” Louise said, aware that she was talking to herself as much as to Eik.

  He ignored her. “She probably has a cell phone, and definitely had access to this computer some idiot forgot to log out of. So of course she googles the name on the APB.”

  Something in his tense voice made Louise walk around the office chair and peek over his shoulder.

  “His name has been typed in, and see, his photos pop up when you search.”

  Photos of Erik Hald Sørensen appeared on the screen, seven of them in the top row of results. Two of the faces she didn’t recognize. The five others were of the retired doctor, photos that had at some time been on the Internet. He also showed up on the second row of results, a few times with his wife, mostly from their choir travels. Possibly from local papers, Louise thought.

  Eik scrolled down the purple links his daughter had opened. He frowned as his fingers worked. “Look at this.” He scooted a bit to the side. “When I search his name with ‘address,’ it’s not the Birkerød address that shows up. Here he’s listed with an address on Skovridergårdsvej in Virum.” He looked up at her.

  “It could be his clinic,” she said. “He might still have that address, even though he gave up his practice.” Then she remembered him mentioning that the clinic was in Hareskovby.