Farewell to Freedom (27 page)

“I'll send a press release to the Ritzau News Service in a bit, and I've already arranged for us to meet a
TV-Avisen
reporter at the church for the 6:30
P
.
M
. broadcast. In addition to that, I'm planning on appearing on the TV2 News at 7
P
.
M
. We're going to have to go public with this, and I don't understand why Bellahøj hasn't already been more aggressive with this. Sillebrandt hasn't been very proactive.”

Louise scrupulously avoided looking over at Lars. Not because there was that much gossip about the homicide chief, but people did joke about his frequent appearances on TV. Louise didn't actually think he overdid it. To the contrary, she was glad to have a boss who was respected by the general population, and no one could deny that when they hit a dead end with a case, this approach was usually what brought them new leads.

“While we wait for the lists from the hospitals, I want to drive out and see Henrik Holm and run through the whole thing with him one more time,” Louise said. “Maybe there's something he just hasn't thought of. And I also want to mention the light green Fiat to him.”

“Bellahøj already talked to him,” Suhr said as Louise was collecting her purse from the floor and stuffing her cell phone into her pocket.

“Yeah,” she replied, “but now the case has been assigned to us, so we'll talk to him.”

The homicide chief nodded and smiled at her.

“Of course.”

“We also need to tell him about the pathologist's report, before the whole story is splashed all over the media,” she added. “But you're not planning to mention the toe when you talk to the press, are you?”

He seemed to consider it for a brief moment, but then he shook his head.

“Not to begin with. As long as we don't know if that has any significance, we might as well spare people that detail. But mention it to the pastor. How the hell should I know—maybe there's some sort of religious significance to it that our limited insight into Biblical history is causing us to miss.”

“Well, that's a possibility,” she conceded, and then told him that Pastor Holm was a little worried that the two tragic events would harm his church.

“You certainly can't blame him for that. I read his column yesterday,” Suhr said as Louise was on her way out. “It was about the ‘maternal instinct,' which doesn't always kick in right away, and he wrote about the scientific explanation, which is that the production of female sex hormones drops off dramatically after giving birth, and that can affect both a woman's attitude and her maternal instinct. His own theory was more that the infant's soul just needed time to settle into place before it was ready to bind itself to its mother and awaken those strong feelings in her. Some just took longer to move in than others, as he put it. It was very interesting, but the piece was obviously inspired by Baby Girl's mother, so he must have written it before the boy's body was found.”

“Why did it happen two times, so close together?” Louise asked, her mind back on the stillborn little boy. “Years can go by without there being an abandoned baby.”

“Every once in a while we have cases of abandoned stillborn infants just months apart, and in rare cases even just weeks. Unfortunately, it's not all that uncommon,” Suhr corrected. He was interrupted by Stig, who had stopped to listen from the open doorway as he unscrewed the lid from a half-liter bottle of cola.

“I'd hazard a guess that you won't be finding the mother in the upper echelon of society,” he said with the same conviction in his voice he had used when he'd informed Louise that you could always tell by looking at a whore if she came from Eastern Europe. “It's only in the lowest classes that children aren't viewed as status symbols. Quite the contrary, they're sometimes perceived as trash if you're unlucky enough to get pregnant, and then it's easier to get rid of the kid than struggle with some government caseworker about institutions and forcible removal.”

Stig paused for effect and took a swig of his soda.

“After all, it's easier to dump a kid than take responsibility,” he continued. “And the people we're talking about here certainly aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, so it's not really a surprise that they use the same place as a dump. That way, they don't have to have a single original thought.”

Louise had a hard time stomaching his tirade and thought about just walking out and leaving him to the others, but hung back when Stig continued.

“Do they know if the stillborn baby's mother was a drug user?”

Stig looked from Louise to Lars.

Lars shrugged and looked over at the provisional report, which was in front of Louise. She shook her head.

“We don't know yet,” Suhr said and got up off the shelf.

“The baby's autopsy was yesterday,” Louise reminded Stig. “The results from the blood tests won't be back until this afternoon or tomorrow.”

“If this were my case, I'd be asking the crackheads and hookers some questions before I spent too much time on the mothers who've been dutifully going to their prenatal appointments and eagerly awaiting the birth of their babies. Those other women, though, you can certainly imagine that there might be some of them who aren't particularly eager to go through official channels with their pregnancies. Especially not if they already knew from the beginning that they were going to get rid of the kid,” he concluded before disappearing off to his office.

Suhr stood there in the doorway, watching him go.

“Actually, he might have a point,” Suhr said, resting an arm on the doorframe as a thoughtful expression came over his face. “Have a chat with the folks at The Nest and find out if they know anyone who had started to show but never turned up with a baby.”

Louise sat with her elbows on her desk and her head resting heavily in her hands. There was always someone who was good at putting other people to work. He could have offered to ask around himself since he was out there anyway, working on those two murder cases, but that would have been too much to expect.

Before Louise heard the sound, she felt the phone in her pocket start vibrating. Blocked, the caller ID said. She excused herself, assuming it must be a personal call, maybe her mother, who she had never called back over the weekend.

“Hi, it's Jakobsen,” the crisis psychologist said, and Louise instinctively glanced at her watch. Camilla had had an appointment at 9:15 that morning. It was eleven now. For a second she was afraid, thinking maybe he'd decided to admit her friend or drug her so heavily that felt he ought to inform Louise.

“She never showed up,” he said tersely, sounding irritated. He was already overbooked before she'd managed to persuade him to squeeze Camilla in, so he was justified. “She didn't even call to cancel.”

Louise stared out the window. Camilla had still been asleep when she left a little before eight, and she had assumed her friend would wake up on her own and make sure she got off on time.

“I tried calling your place, too, because I understood she had spent the weekend there, but no one's answering, and she doesn't answer the cell phone number I had for her either.”

“I don't get it,” was all Louise could think to say. “I'll stop by home and get her. I'm really sorry. She must have overslept,” Louise apologized, and added that Camilla had been very tired since her experience out at the church. “I should have made sure she got up myself.”

“Call me when you get ahold of her. We'll have to set up a new appointment.”

Jakobsen still sounded pissed.

Lars and Suhr were looking at her as she put her phone back in her pocket.

“Camilla just blew Jakobsen off,” she explained. “I have to drive home and find out if she's okay.”

Lars nodded, but she could tell that Suhr was about to lose it, given all the work they had ahead of them.

“It won't take long,” Louise promised, pulling on her jacket. “And it's on the way to Stenhøj Church anyway.”

36

A
T FIRST SHE COULDN'T FIND THE ALARM CLOCK ON THE
nightstand, so she propped herself up on her elbow and then spotted it down on the floor. Still half asleep, she reached for it and saw that it was almost ten.

Camilla had been up most of the night, but she must have eventually fallen asleep just before dawn. She hadn't heard Louise or Markus get up. He had slept on a mattress on the floor right next to her bed, and the whole time she was lying there awake, staring into the darkness, she had listened to his relaxed breathing.

She set down the alarm clock, and after she rubbed her eyes she spotted the note on the nightstand.

I LOVE YOU MOM. MARKUS.

She read the sentence again and suddenly felt afraid and let the affectionate note flutter down onto the comforter as she lay back down on the pillow. It occurred to her that she didn't feel anything. The warmth she usually felt in her heart when she read one of his little declarations of love did not come, nor did the smile that always appeared without her even being aware of it, nor did she picture his face. And she didn't try to imagine him sitting in the kitchen writing it for her.

Again it struck her that everything that was usually inside her was gone. And she was scared to think that it might be gone forever if even one of Markus's little notes couldn't make her happy. When she thought about it, she realized that what she mostly felt was apathetic.

She closed her eyes and lay there for a long time without moving. Kaj had kept appearing in her thoughts overnight. She thought about his life, which she didn't know shit about aside from the few details he'd shared with her, and at one point overnight she had cried because it was so unfair that she'd had to postpone his funeral. She realized she'd been looking forward to the funeral, to taking care of it, doing a little something for him, decorating with flowers and playing Johnny Cash for him.

She pulled the blanket up over her head and lay like that for a long time. She heard the phone ringing in the living room, but pulled the blanket in closer around her face and lay there until it stopped. She'd turned off her cell phone the previous evening. It was on the nightstand, and she couldn't be bothered to turn it on. She was sure there would be at least one message from Høyer.

Suddenly she remembered Jakobsen and her appointment with him at National Hospital. She couldn't remember what time it was for—it was on a slip of paper in the kitchen—but she knew she was already too late.

She swung her legs out over the edge of the bed and wriggled a little on the mattress to reach the sweatpants she'd tossed on the floor before she climbed into bed. She kept the T-shirt she'd slept in on and went to the bathroom.

The phone rang again, but she closed the door and sat down on the toilet. She wasn't hungry and didn't need coffee, didn't have any needs. The only thing she could feel was an all-encompassing melancholy. All the same, she decided to go out and get a little air.

The sun was shining and down on the street below people were walking around in their shirtsleeves or lightweight jackets. She stuck her bare feet into a pair of Adidas sneakers Louise had sitting in her hallway and pulled a white sweater on over her head. She pulled her blonde hair into a loose ponytail. Her Mulberry purse was the only thing that revealed that she was normally much more put together.

She walked all the way down Gammel Kongevej to Central Station. She wanted to go to Plaza, where Kaj had reigned in the kitchen in his day, and she thought she might settle for a cup of coffee in the bar. The sun hurt her eyes. She'd forgotten her sunglasses, so she walked with her eyes squinted, heading into the bright daylight. It wasn't until she passed the planetarium that it occurred to her that the Plaza had been sold many times since the legendary hotel magnate had owned it and turned it into something special. Several international hotel chains had owned it since, so there probably wasn't much of Kaj's spirit left. She decided to get her coffee from somewhere inside Central Station instead. There was also something appealing about the idea of sitting in there and being an anonymous face in the crowd. Blending in with all the other strangers who were just passing through.

She took a free paper from the holder on her way in and walked down through the high-ceilinged railroad station concourse with its shops and newsstands along one side and the stairways down to the train tracks on the other. There weren't very many people in the DSB café, so she tossed her papers on an empty table and went up to the window to get a coffee.