Call Me Princess (8 page)

Louise considered whether she should tell Susanne that in fact he was an exact match for the description Susanne had given them, but Louise knew it was hard to understand how precise a description had to be before you could pick out a person who even vaguely resembled the person you were looking for. It wasn’t that easy to explain the wide range that “dark” and “dark hair” actually covered when someone described it that way, based on an image in their head.

Susanne clicked to the next image.

“His forehead wasn’t that high, his temples are even higher,” she said, studying the photograph of a sleepy man with tousled hair. It wasn’t any easier to recognize people when many of them were groggy and disheveled because they were usually photographed the morning after their arrest.

Louise took down Susanne’s comments on her pad of paper. “His eyes are prettier!” Susanne exclaimed.

“How so?”

“More honest.”

“How so?” Louise repeated.

“They’re more attentive.”

“Explain.”

“They aren’t set as close as his.” Susanne pointed at the screen.

Eyes not close-set,
Louise wrote on her pad.

An hour later, she handed a piece of paper to the technician. Three times Susanne had exclaimed, “That’s him!” And the first time her outburst triggered sobbing, after which she sat for several minutes staring out into space.

Each time, Louise had suggested they take a break. The monotonous clicking when a new picture was called up was grating on their nerves, and sitting in the dark was making them sleepy. However, Susanne had quickly composed herself and said they should continue; but when Louise asked why she thought it was him, it turned out she actually wasn’t sure.

“He looks like him. The mouth and nose are the same.”

The technician came in and handed them a piece of paper with the names and details on the three people she had picked out. The first man, Karsten Flintholm, had done time for rape, and that made Louise’s adrenaline surge. His picture would undoubtedly also be in the sexual-offenders file. The two other men hadn’t been previously connected to rape.

Flintholm was the only one Susanne had immediately responded to as she sat flipping through the blue binder of sexual offenders, but she looked hard at the pictures that came up each time she turned a page.
As though she’s memorizing the faces
, Louise thought, wondering if Susanne thought maybe she could learn to see the evil in them if she paid enough attention. Louise felt sorry for her and hoped it was some consolation that many of them looked quite average. There were only a couple where you could tell by looking that you probably wouldn’t want to meet them on a dark night.

Louise called Lars and asked him to check the three names in the criminal-offender registry so they could see whether they were currently in or out of jail.

In addition to the three specific men, Louise described the general type of face Susanne had pointed out for the suspect. From her comments about a high forehead, eyes not closely set, and the other details that Louise had written down on her pad, the technician pieced together a description in the room next door and handed her a printout.

She took Susanne downstairs. Her face was hidden in the shadow of her baseball cap again, concealing her dark bruises. Initially Susanne said she would be taking sick leave from work for the rest of the week, but the crime-scene investigators had said that they had finished at her apartment that day, so she could move in again if she felt she was ready, and she was now contemplating going back into the office.

“Maybe you should stay with your mother until you’ve gotten a little distance from the attack?” Louise suggested before they parted ways. She considered mentioning that Susanne’s mother had contacted the newspaper, to see if Susanne was aware of that.

“I’d rather go home.”

“How is your mother taking all this?” Louise asked, curious. “It must have given her quite a fright.”

“She called a locksmith so I could get the keys changed, and had a peephole and chain installed on my door. She doesn’t know I was out on a date with him.”

Susanne shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Are you trying to keep that a secret?” Louise asked.

Susanne carefully touched the wound on her left cheekbone. “It’s no secret. We just don’t talk about stuff like that,” she said after a long pause.

“You’re not close?” Louise asked.

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. She has created her own image of what my life is, and it’s not that easy for her to see beyond those preconceived notions.”

Louise pulled her over to a bench on the landing. They spoke softly so their voices wouldn’t carry through the stairwell.

“What does she want your life to be like?” Louise prodded.

“The way things usually are. I’ve lived alone for twelve years. I moved to the apartment downstairs when I was twenty, when I got my job at the bank. We’ve got our rhythm, my mother and I, and she really likes things this way. Everything’s become routine.”

“A routine you don’t dare—or don’t want—to break out of?”

“There’s no need to change anything until there’s a reason to,” Susanne replied, evasively.

“Did you know that your mother got in touch with the press and told them your story?”

Louise still wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to bring this up, but this was the closest thing to a heart-to-heart they’d had so far, where Louise was able to get some insight into the life that Susanne had been living until Monday night when she went out to dinner with the man who called himself Jesper Bjergholdt.

At first Susanne didn’t respond to what Louise said, but then she kicked the toes of her shoes together.

“I didn’t know that,” Susanne admitted with a sigh. “But she can’t understand why he hasn’t been arrested.” She glanced at Louise out the corner of her good eye. “She’s afraid he’ll come back.”

“Are
you
afraid he’ll come back?” Louise asked.

Susanne shrugged.

“I don’t think I’m afraid... and yet... I don’t feel anything. I might also run into him on the way to work, or he could be standing there when I get home.”

She took off her cap, set it in her lap, and shook her short hair.

“It didn’t occur to me in the least that that night could have ended in such a disaster, and it may sound strange after all that’s happened, but I can’t really imagine it happening again, either.”

Louise watched her as she spoke. There was naïveté and a protective shell around her that evidently had been there for many years, but at the same time she sensed that now there was also an awareness that you can’t always control what life has in store for you.

“Maybe it’s time you took responsibility for your own life,” Louise suggested, noticing how absurd it was that Susanne had been so deeply hurt the very first time she had made an attempt to do something slightly out of the ordinary.

“Maybe.”

“At any rate, you ought to talk to your mother. I don’t think either of you should be talking to any more reporters,” Louise said, looking for a way to make her next point so it wouldn’t sound as harsh. “But now that the story is out, you’re going to have to resign yourself to the possibility that the fact will come out that you knew the suspect in advance and that you had been out together.”

Susanne put her cap back on and nodded. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, either,” she said, to convince herself of that sentiment.

“Not at all,” Louise acknowledged.

She walked back to her office and threw the printout onto Lars’s desk.

“Something along these lines,” Louise said, sitting down.

He read the descriptions while he updated her on what he had found out while she was gone.

“Karsten Flintholm was released seven months ago,” Lars began. “We’ve got both fingerprints and DNA for him, so it might be easy to match if it turns out anything is still usable from Susanne’s place. The second face she picked out is Nils Walther. He’s been out for over a year, but, as I said before, he’s never been involved in a crime of this caliber before. He’s mostly interested in things that can be converted into cash.”

Louise pushed her chair back and propped her legs up on the edge of her desk.

“The last guy, Søren Matthisen, is still in prison. He has another year to go for rape, so he’s out of the picture.”

“He wasn’t on weekend release by any chance and failed to return on Monday?” Louise brainstormed.

Lars smiled, shook his head, and said “I checked.”

“I’ll try to get hold of Camilla.”

She was a little afraid to hear what Susanne’s mother had told Camilla and recalled what Susanne had said. Louise recognized the feeling of irritation from the past when her own mother had been a little too controlling, but she knew it couldn’t compare. Here they were clearly dealing with a mother who had seized control over her daughter’s life. She lived right upstairs, which in and of itself was enough to make Louise cringe. A mother who was involved in controlling what her daughter did, what relationships she had, and what opinions she held. She probably also knew all the people Susanne hung out with—and there most likely wouldn’t be many of them. It must feel like living in a gigantic straitjacket.

Poor Susanne
, Louise mumbled, noticing that Lars was looking at with her with a questioning expression on his face. To a certain extent, she felt sympathy for Susanne and how she had secretly tried to forge a path out of her mother’s domination by carefully trying to create her own happiness and look for a husband and family. In her peculiar living situation, the only refuge that was free from her mother’s ever-watchful eye was the Internet. Her seemingly uncharacteristic turn to online dating now made more sense than ever.

C
AMILLA ANSWERED HER PHONE SO FAST,
L
OUISE SUSPECTED
she’d been sitting there with her hand hovering over the receiver.

“What did Susanne Hansson’s mother say when she called you?” Louise began, without even saying hello.

“Susanne Hansson?” Camilla’s attempt to feign ignorance did not succeed.

“Knock off the subterfuge,” Louise insisted. “I really want to know what her mother told you. I just don’t get why she even contacted you. What did she want?”

The length of time it took Camilla to respond told Louise that her friend was considering whether or not she could get something in exchange for her information.

“She didn’t understand why the paper hadn’t reported the assault,” Camilla finally said. “She feels like all you ever read about is rapes, but then no one was interested in such a crime against her own daughter.”

“She really ought to be grateful for that,” Louise huffed.

“Well, she wasn’t!” Camilla said, sounding jovial but then quickly becoming serious. “It sounds like an awful story. I haven’t been able to get Lieutenant Suhr to confirm the chain of events, which I’m assuming means I’m pretty close... or maybe the actual details are even worse, and that’s why he’s being so tight-lipped about it.”

“It may also have something to do with the fact that we’d like to keep things quiet so we can work the case,” Louise interrupted.

“I’d be happy to fill you in on what the mother said, if you’ll tell me what happened.”

“Enough already, Camilla. I’m not telling you anything. Whatever you get on this one has to come from Suhr. But I have the feeling that there’ll be some information later today. Your phone call put enough pressure on Suhr that he’s insisting we come up with something to tell you.”

“Good,” Camilla said, clearly satisfied that her call had triggered a reaction. As a result, she decided to fill Louise in on the details of the mother’s phone call.

“She told me she found her daughter in a pool of blood, with her hands and feet tied behind her back, beaten, and gagged. The guy who did it had tried to suffocate her by stuffing a block of wood in her mouth—”

“Stop!” Louise cried into the phone. “No pool of blood, no attempted suffocation! Outside of the police report, I mean. You don’t need to tell me any more. Save yourself some trouble and don’t put your name on that garbage, you’ll just end up having to retract the whole story later.”

Camilla was so audibly disappointed that Louise guessed she must have finished writing most of the article already.

“It’s nowhere near as sensational as all that,” Louise said, trying to sound convincing as she pictured Susanne’s puffy face. “The most dramatic aspect of the case is that the girl has a mother who is an unbelievable blabbermouth.”

“Maybe,” Camilla cut her off; “but obviously the mother didn’t fucking arrange for her daughter to be raped so she could enjoy her fifteen minutes of fame.”

“No, of course not; but now that the opportunity
has
presented itself, she certainly doesn’t seem to be being shy,” Louise countered.

“That may be,” Camilla said pensively. “I think I’m going to have another chat with her.”

“You won’t get anything out of her. Michael Stig is with her now, and he is usually quite effective at persuading people to put a lid on things.”

“Ha,” Camilla said dryly. “Okay, I’ll agree to sit on the story until after I’ve talked to Suhr. But not if I can read it anywhere else.”

Louise understood that agreeing to sit on a story involved a calculated risk.

“And I would appreciate your keeping me in mind, once you guys are finally able to talk about whatever actually happened to that poor woman. Oh, and hey, is there any chance you could watch Markus this weekend?”

The change in topics was so abrupt that Louise shook her head, trying to switch gears. On the spot she couldn’t think of any fixed plans they had for the weekend, so she nodded to herself and said “Sure thing.”

Camilla sometimes had to work weekends at the newspaper, and then she had a childcare situation because she lived alone with Markus. The boy’s father, Tobias, had him every other weekend, and he was usually able to help out whenever Camilla had to work. When he couldn’t, Camilla was forced to make other arrangements because her mother lived four hours away in Skanderborg in Jutland, and her father was not interested in shuttling grandchildren around.