Louise sat with her cell phone in her hand, having just sent a text to Camilla. She reassured her by saying that she’d be heading out to the house on Strandvænget to talk with Ulrik, and at the same time she’d certainly see how things were going with Britt.
“Why didn’t he mention Nick Hartmann when he said he owned the boathouse?”
She looked across the desk at Sejr, who was wearing a red Coca-Cola baseball cap. It smushed his white hair down over his ears.
Sejr pressed his fingertips together and looked at her speculatively.
“It’s possible he didn’t know about it,” he said and dropped his hands.
He offered her a cola and grabbed two from the fridge.
“If Nick Hartmann had registered himself as just HartmannImport/Export, it’s not for certain that he’d have noticed the connection to the murder. And besides, Fasting-Thomsen has had other things to think about lately.”
He passed the half-liter bottle across the desk.
Louise thought he was right, and dialed Willumsen’s extension to tell the lead investigator that they’d tracked down Hartmann’s storage site.
* * *
“Two people to the warehouse,” Willumsen commanded.
He pulled Toft and Michael Stig into Louise’s office.
“You’re driving down to Svanemølle Harbor,” he said and pointed to them.
He was about to point at Sejr, but thought better of it. Instead he nodded in his direction.
“Maybe you could look a little into Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen? See if there’s anything on his businesses? Have we gotten into it at all?”
He looked around at them, but Louise reminded him that until now they’d had no reason to be interested in the investment consultant.
“And strictly speaking, there isn’t necessarily any connection between them, other than he owns a warehouse that the deceased’s company rented space in,” she said. “It was Fasting-Thomsen himself who made us aware that he owns the building down on South Pier, so it’s not exactly something he’s trying to hide from us.”
Then she told them about Signe and the reason why Ulrik had stopped by the department.
“Will you get hold of him and ask him what he knows about his renter?” asked Willumsen.
Louise nodded.
“Then the rest of us will dig into the warehouse and try to find out what kind of a connection there is between the two of them,” he said.
Louise remained standing behind her desk as Willumsen and her two colleagues left the office. She reached for her cell phone and found Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen’s business card in a drawer where she’d tossed it when he left.
When his phone went to voice mail, she left a message explaining that she was interested in talking with him about his warehouse and the man he’d rented some of the space to.
She waved across the desk to get Sejr’s attention.
“I’m heading out to Strandvænget to see if he’s back home,” she said.
He nodded from his sound bubble.
She shook her head at him and smiled. Then she put her empty cola bottle in the box behind him and took her jacket off the peg.
Just then her cell phone started to vibrate on the desk.
“Louise Rick,” she said, adding in the same sentence, “Ulrik, hi!”
Then she realized it wasn’t Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen promptly returning her call.
“Hey there, when did you get home?” she said, surprised to be hearing Flemming Larsen’s voice on the other end.
It had been a month since she’d last spoken with the medical examiner, even though they’d started going out regularly for coffee or a drink. In the beginning of September, he’d traveled to Thailand with his children. Neither his ex-wife nor the children’s teacher had been thrilled about the trip being planned outside of a school break. But it was the only time he could get away from the Department of Forensic Medicine for three weeks in a row, so they’d finally worked it out.
After it had come to shared custody, he often had a ridiculously hard time making things work out, and his ex would sometimes use it against him. So, it had meant a lot to him that the trip actually went off.
“Coffee?” he asked.
Louise gave it a quick thought.
“Love to, but I’m heading out to Svanemølle.”
“I could drive you, if it doesn’t take too long. I’ll just wait in the car, and then we could have coffee afterward—or, what about Jonas?”
“He’s down with his new best friend, Melvin. He’s our downstairs neighbor, and those two have just started tackling the Danmark Expedition and sit around absorbed in history books. I promised to have food on the table by seven. Then they’ll both come up and eat.”
“Fine. When should I pick you up?”
Louise could hear that he was already sitting in his car.
“How about now?” she said, grabbing her bag off the floor.
She and Flemming Larsen had gotten to know each other over the years, but it was only in the last three or four that they’d seen each other privately. Otherwise they mostly met in the autopsy bay, when they ran into each other on a case. But their friendship had grown after that day when Louise had come home from work and her boyfriend, Peter, sat in her living room drinking up the courage to tell her he was leaving her for a colleague. In the evening, Flemming had shown up with a bottle of Calvados and cigarettes. He knew perfectly well that neither of them smoked, but that night he thought they might like to start.
Later, Louise had seen that Peter’s decision hadn’t come completely out of the blue. For years, he hadn’t hidden the fact that he wanted a family life with kids and their own place. She, on the other hand, didn’t want that at all. It was a relief to be rid of the pressure he’d put on her.
* * *
Only the Golf was parked in the double carport when Louise and Flemming Larsen made it out to Strandvænget. But it wasn’t much past four thirty, so maybe she’d been a little too optimistic to think Ulrik Fasting-Thomsen would already be home. She looked up at the large house, where someone had left the light over the front door on. Otherwise, the house looked abandoned.
Flemming Larsen turned off the engine and gave the impression that he’d just sit there.
“Please; you should come in with me,” she said.
On the drive there, she’d told him about Signe and the party down at the sailing club, and it turned out Flemming already knew about the accident and had read the autopsy report. It was lying on his desk when he got back from his vacation.
“I’m sure Britt would want to know how her daughter died. Right now, she’s imagining all kinds of things. So, come on in with me,” she said.
She opened the car door and nodded up to the house.
The afternoon had turned gray and damp, and a pungent smell of seaweed rose from Svanemølle Harbor, where the Power Station sent heavy columns of smoke into the air, climbing high up in the sky before they were carried away and dissolved in the wind.
The gate stood open, and the garden path was littered with brown and yellow leaves that clung to each other and got stuck on the soles of their shoes as Louise and Flemming walked up to the house. The outdoor candles were full of water, and several of the roses hung with their petals withered at the edges and their leaves turned brown and curled.
Britt answered the door in a dove-blue house dress, her hair held back in a wide gold barrette with embroidered roses. She looked curiously at Flemming Larsen and held the nearly six foot five medical examiner’s hands between hers, while Louise introduced them to each other.
“How nice of you to come,” she told him.
She stepped to the side and found a couple of hangers for their coats.
“I’ve begged everyone I could think of to tell me what happened to my daughter the night she died. But no one could tell me anything more than that she died of her injuries. I’d be glad to have it cleared up,” she said, leading them through the living room and on out to the kitchen.
“Would you like something? Tea or coffee?”
The dining room was in partial darkness. Neither the candles nor the lamps had been lit, and on the long dining table there was a stack of newspapers in a lopsided pile, as if they were on their way to the recycling bin but got stranded along the way. The double doors into the music room and the other rooms were closed and the stereo system was shut off.
“I mostly stay upstairs,” Britt said.
She pointed them to the table along the kitchen wall, then found a pack of matches in a drawer and lit the pillar candles on the windowsill.
“Actually, what I’d like is something cold,” Flemming Larsen said and pulled out a chair. He nodded his approval when Britt took a bottle of mineral water out of the refrigerator and asked if he’d drink something like that.
When he settled into his chair, Louise noticed how his hair had started to go thin on top. His medium-length blond hair had gotten bleached during the three weeks in Thailand with sun and seawater, and it was cut so short that you really didn’t see the bald spot that was starting to appear on the top of his head. But normally, you wouldn’t have a chance to see it anyway because he was so tall. He had friendly wrinkles that ran down his cheeks when he smiled, and there was a convincing warmth and confidence in his green eyes, which were edged with brown around the irises. They always made Louise feel like she was in competent hands when she worked on a case with Flemming Larsen.
Now his pleasant look was turned toward Britt Fasting-Thomsen, who’d filled up their glasses.
“For Ulrik and me it is indescribable that our daughter isn’t here anymore,” she said and sank down into the last chair. “It seems like my life’s come to a halt. When I was out doing some shopping this morning, it felt like an insult that cars and buses still drove around. Everything just goes on and on, as if nothing happened. The newspapers are still full of that Sachs-Smith scandal. They ran that even before Signe died. But none of the papers have written more than a little paragraph about the accident that took her life. A paragraph. And then the obituary that we submitted ourselves.”
She shook her head and rubbed her hand over her eyes, which were sad and tired. Their brilliance was gone. Britt Fasting-Thomsen was withering away.
“What happened to her? Well, I know that she ran in front of a moving van. But how much did she know about it? Did she feel anything?”
Her thin arms rested on the table, and her look was unguarded and vulnerable. She wasn’t hiding behind any notions she had of how her daughter had died.
Louise saw Flemming Larsen thinking it over. He delayed by emptying his glass of water.
“They say she died immediately. But she didn’t, did she?”
Britt’s sea-blue eyes stared at him until he leaned forward in his chair and folded his hands in front of him.
He shook his head.
“Your daughter did not die immediately. No. But she was never conscious, so she didn’t feel anything. Didn’t suffer,” he assured her.
Britt nodded.
“If Signe had been hit by a passenger car, she would very likely have been thrown into the air at impact,” he said. “But when someone’s hit head-on by a moving van, as in your daughter’s case, then most of the body is hit. Besides that, her head was seriously injured when she was flung down on the asphalt.”
Britt didn’t move and barely took a breath.
“When the rescue workers got to her, she didn’t have any visible injuries on her face, just a few skin abrasions, but she had swelling on both sides of her head, with bleeding from her ears, and that raised the suspicion of a fracture in the bottom part of her neurocranium. Sometimes a blow to the head will produce injuries to the cerebral cortex and hemorrhages between the soft membranes of the brain.”
“Why hasn’t anyone told me this?” Britt interrupted. She looked at Flemming in confusion.
He shrugged his shoulders and couldn’t answer.
“The scan showed that there was a large blood clot under the hard membranes of her brain and widespread injuries on her neurocranium. They were about to drill a small hole in her brain to release the pressure on her skull when she died.”
He laid his hand over Britt’s limp arm.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“All of this happened while I was in the hospital. Why didn’t anyone tell me, so I could have been with her?”
Louise put her arm around Britt’s shoulder.
“At that point, you were on the operating table yourself,” she quietly reminded her.
She hadn’t known any of what Flemming said, either. She’d been satisfied with the news that Signe had died shortly after arriving at the hospital.
“What did they do then, after she died?” Britt whispered.
“She was brought into the six-hours room,” said Flemming. “Everyone who’s pronounced dead is. We wait for there to be positive signs of death, and then the hospital porters come and push the deceased into the cooler. After that, we make a legal medical inspection of the body, and in this case, followed that with an autopsy. The doctors did everything they could to save your daughter.”
He gave Britt’s arm a soft squeeze then straightened back up.
Louise looked away. Thought he’d told her too much, was too detailed. She hoped Ulrik was on his way. To her surprise, Britt stood up and went over and put her arms around Flemming.
“Thank you so very much,” she said and gave him a hug.
“I actually need to talk with Ulrik, but I can’t get hold of him. When do you expect him home?” Louise asked.
She stood up to take their water glasses to the sink.
“Not till Sunday. He’s on his way to Iceland. There are a bunch of his clients up there who aren’t having an easy time with their investments at the moment. But you should be able to reach him at the hotel this evening. He lands at eight o’clock, and so he should be at the hotel an hour later.”
Britt no longer seemed so vulnerable, although she still looked tired.
Flemming Larsen stood up, and Britt followed them out. She stood at the front door as they walked back to the medical examiner’s silver-gray Passat.