Eggs, bacon, toast, English muffins, bagels, scones, pancakes, Danishes—Camilla couldn’t get herself to order the pastry that had made Danes famous over there, even though it bore little resemblance to what you’d get at a real bakery in Denmark. There was also fruit, hot cocoa, and a pot of Earl Grey with warm milk beside it. When the whole thing was rolled in on a table, Camilla could tell she’d overdone it. She hurried to get a handful of dollar bills, so she’d be ready with the tip when everything was in place.
They managed about half of it before they had to give up and stack the plates in a tall pile on the tray, which Camilla set out in the hall. Then she put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and crawled back into bed.
She took out the newspapers she’d grabbed on the SAS flight. Morgenavisen and Berlingske both teemed with the Sachs-Smith scandal. The old and well-reputed family dynasty that owned Termo-Lux had built up an enormous fortune with thermal windows. The family was on the list of the country’s richest people, and now they’d been hit with a messy and salacious scandal that was rocking the media world.
Camilla turned the pages with interest.
It had been a couple of weeks since the flag at the dynasty’s headquarters in Roskilde was set at half-mast and the news outlet Ritzau had reported the sad news that Inger Sachs-Smith, married to the head of the family, Walther Sachs-Smith, had taken her own life. She’d been found in her bed with two empty bottles of sleeping pills on the nightstand.
All the papers had cleared their front page. It became the tragic top story for many days, because in the wake of the suicide it leaked out that there was a coup, or a family takeover of power, at Termo-Lux. In the meantime, neither board members, sources in the firm, nor even their press secretary had been willing to comment. That left it with the conjectures and analyses from industry experts, who believed that the two youngest children—Carl Emil, thirty-eight, and Rebekka, two years younger—along with the family’s attorney had convinced Walther Sachs-Smith that he should pass on power to the next generation, even though he was still joint owner of the family business, founded sixty years earlier by his grandparents in a rather humble area on the outskirts of Roskilde.
Now she read that Walther Sachs-Smith had disappeared and had been gone for at least three days. A few days after his wife’s burial, he was reported missing, and now the vast majority of the press guessed that he’d chosen to follow his wife in death.
Business reporters interviewed experts about the consequences of a power takeover, given that the two siblings were the only family members left on the board and the attorney had only recently been appointed. Gossip columnists were more interested in digging up everything they could on Carl Emil and Rebekka, not least their associations with the royal family’s younger generation.
Camilla didn’t have the energy for that part of the story. She had a hard time imagining anything more trivial, after what the children had done to their parents. She’d always had a good impression of the Sachs-Smith family, not that she knew them personally, but she’d grown up in Roskilde. The parents always struck her as sympathetic and straightforward, despite their being loaded with money. The father often had to step in and smooth things out when his two youngest children got a little too carried away with their jet-set lifestyle.
Markus had turned on the TV and was surfing through the channels, deeply impressed with the selection. For the moment, he was watching America’s Funniest Home Videos.
She took up the second newspaper, sighing over how they could spend two whole pages repeating the story of Inger Sachs-Smith’s suicide and the domestic worker who’d found her in her bedroom.
SHE DIED IN HER SLEEP
In the caption, it said that Fru Inger had emptied two bottles of potent sleeping pills, so she hadn’t been in any doubt over what she was doing. She wanted to die.
More gossip about Carl Emil’s numerous lovers and his alleged fondness for kinky sex, and the same old stuff about Rebekka’s ex-husband and the child they’d had together. The girl was in kindergarten, and the picture of her was big enough that all of her classmates would easily recognize her—if anyone still needed to be told that it was her mother who’d apparently driven her grandparents to their deaths.
How awful, thought Camilla.
She flipped through.
On the next page, she paused over a picture of the somewhat lesser known big brother. The eldest of the children.
Frederik Sachs-Smith hadn’t lived in Denmark for the last fifteen years. As a twenty-seven-year-old, he’d moved to the U.S.A. and had never been part of the jet-set inner circle. Still, she recognized his face because she’d written about him when his first American film premiered in Hollywood.
He was the outsider who’d turned his back on the family dynasty to follow his dream. Before he moved to the U.S.A., he’d gone to the Copenhagen Film School and written screenplays for two Danish feature films, neither of which met with noteworthy success. After that, he applied to and was accepted at a well-known film school in New York and, as far as Camilla recalled, by then he’d already pulled up stakes for good. She thought of him as a mixture of upper-class bohemian and cool businessman. It cost him absolutely nothing if his projects succeeded or failed, because he had so much money in his checkbook that he really didn’t need to earn anything. Along with his film work, he was also a financier and investor and had evidently used his inheritance from his grandparents and the money from his parents wisely. At any rate, he’d made himself a considerable fortune and obviously wouldn’t be affected by the shockwaves that hit the family’s economy.
Camilla knew the stuff about the money only because Markus was in the same class as Signe and she was good friends with Britt Fasting-Thomsen. Ulrik, Signe’s father, was Frederik Sachs-Smith’s investment consultant and financial advisor. The previous year Ulrik had been so involved in his work for Sachs-Smith that it had cost him his summer vacation with Britt and Signe.
While Ulrik was away in the U.S.A., Camilla and Markus joined Britt and Signe at their summer house up in Skagen. They’d had some marvelous weeks together, with chilled white wine in the garden and steaks from Munch’s Butcher Shop.
She looked at the photo. Frederik Sachs-Smith. Forty-two years old, unmarried, and with an arrogant but somewhat charming smile. His medium-length blond hair blew in the breeze as he stood in bare feet on the edge of his pool at his house in Santa Barbara where, she read, he’d lived for the last eight years after several in New York and L.A.
Camilla folded the newspapers and tossed them on the floor, then crawled over to Markus in the big queen-size bed. He lay there laughing at people who fell on their asses or got hit in the head with a surfboard. The worse they got hurt, the more the audience laughed at them. Pretty tasteless.
Even so, Camilla couldn’t help laughing herself when a severely overweight man tried to drive his lawn tractor up a slope and was furious when it stopped halfway to the top. Finally, he backed up, got a good running start, and came at it full throttle. The result was that the little tractor and the large man both went end-over. It had to hurt like hell, but it looked outrageously funny when he hung there suspended between the slope and his lawn tractor.
“What time is it in Denmark?” asked Markus, looking at the clock radio’s digital numbers.
“They’re nine hours ahead of us, so it’s ten thirty at night.”
“Then Signe’s party’s over now.”
She nodded. She’d hoped he’d forgotten it. Understood perfectly well that he was sorry to miss it.
“Oh, no!” he yelled and sat straight up in the bed. “I forgot to give Jonas her gift from me. Now she hasn’t gotten it, and she must think I didn’t give her anything just because I didn’t go to the party.”
Tears began to swell.
“What did you buy her?” asked Camilla.
She ran her fingers through his hair.
“The new Beyoncé CD, and now it’s lying at home on my desk.”
For a moment, he sat staring blankly at Camilla, and she started to get the feeling it was all her fault.
“We’ll buy something over here and send it back to her. Don’t you think she’d like to have a gift from here?”
He sat a while with his eyes on the commercials flashing across the screen, then he nodded and leaned back.