At half past four, Louise was ready to drive home. She wanted to be sure she and Jonas had plenty of time to sit down together. The night before, when she’d come back from Mie’s, he’d closed himself in his room with the puppy. On the kitchen table, he’d laid Morgenavisen for her. The front page was splashed with a large photograph of Britt Fasting-Thomsen, and in bold caps it read:
VENGEANCE THIRSTY MOTHER
JAILED FOR ARSON-HOMICIDE
She’d knocked softly on his door and asked if he wanted to talk about it. She wanted to tell him about the investigation, but he’d shaken his head and focused on the puppy. She, for her part, hadn’t been ready to talk about that issue yet.
The next morning, he was out walking Dina when Louise got up, and they came back just before he had to leave for school. With her tea cup in hand, she’d stood listening as he grabbed his book bag and went down to drop off the puppy at Melvin’s.
It wasn’t very grownup of her not to have talked it through with him. Poor of her to delay. She should also have told him about Britt’s arrest. Jonas had known Signe’s mother much longer than Louise had known her, and it was low of her to make him read about it in the newspaper when she could have prepared him first. But the dog and Mik had gotten in the way, and then she’d had to drive out to Mie and her little baby.
Louise unlocked her bike and tightened her helmet.
They needed to talk about the dog, she thought, and that was the hardest part of the conversation for her to tackle. She needed to be sure that she’d thought it over thoroughly, so she was able to make a lasting decision.
After Louise had driven Britt back to prison following the day’s interrogation, she’d taken her coat and gone for a walk down to the harbor. She walked down along the water past The Black Diamond library, while she tried to bring order to her thoughts and make them clear and definite to herself. Went back and forth, tried to look ahead and feel it out. Words like “consequence” and “forever” emerged and filled her thoughts a good deal, but at the same time she felt a heavy load of sadness overshadowing everything.
She kept walking and saw a couple of men sail by in a little motorboat. Mik still hadn’t called. Her anger had settled down a bit, but far from enough for her to want to call him.
An hour later she felt ready to walk back. To say that she felt serene was probably going too far, but she felt satisfied. At the office, she’d packed her things and went around to Suhr’s office to say she was leaving for the day.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, worried.
She shook her head.
“I was just out to Nick Hartmann’s widow last night.”
So far nothing had come out of the technicians’ inspection, and that made Louise doubt that they’d find anything.
“I’d like to spend some time with Jonas today.”
“Understandable enough,” her boss said, and nodded. “Michael Stig and the president of Danish Furniture Design are about to go through the furniture in the warehouse, so we’ll soon have a general idea of what the fake furniture would bring in if it were sold as authentic.”
On her way home, she pulled off at the Irma on Gammel Kongevej and went inside for baking potatoes and veal cutlets.
* * *
No one was home when Louise let herself into the apartment on the fourth floor, but in the entryway, there was an opened roll of dog-waste bags. The signals were clear: Jonas wanted that dog. It looked as though he’d gone shopping on his way home from school. In his room, there was a newly purchased dog bed and next to it two bowls for food and water. Everything was there except dog and boy.
On the other hand, there was a sea of messages from Camilla on the answering machine connected to her landline, and she noticed that her cell phone had also been bombarded. She’d put it on silent mode while she walked along the harbor gathering her thoughts, and then she’d forgotten to take it off.
“Skype?” she wrote in a text to Camilla and went in and turned on the computer in her bedroom.
Five minutes later, there appeared a blurry image of her friend, shouting the way you do when a telephone connection is bad and several words get drowned out before they reach their recipient.
“Why the hell haven’t you called? Haven’t you seen my messages?” Camilla asked on the computer screen.
Louise could see that she’d taken the laptop with her to a corner of the hotel room, where evidently, the wireless connection was better.
“I just got in the door. What’s happened that’s so important?”
“Earlier today I was out and interviewed Frederik Sachs-Smith,” said Camilla. “He said he’d had a visit from Ulrik and his wife.”
“Hmm…,” Louise said absently and didn’t immediately catch what was alarming about the information.
“But Britt’s never been to the U.S., and the person Ulrik introduced as his wife in Santa Barbara didn’t look like Britt, either. She was blond and buxom. You need to find out who the hell he travels around with and refers to as his wife.”
She said that she’d pumped Frederik for more information, once he’d become more talkative, and apparently Ulrik and the blonde spoke about everyday things, experiences, and travels in a way that made their host believe they were married.
“It must be someone he knows pretty well, to be able to convince people they’re married. At any rate, it’s not Britt because she doesn’t fly and besides that she was with me at the summer house when Ulrik was away. But it doesn’t fit with the picture I have of him, at all.”
“No,” Louise conceded and shook her head at Camilla’s face on the screen.
Her friend sighed and brushed her blond hair back. She looked tanned and healthy, had on a white shirt open at the neck.
“Have you thought that it might be his secretary or a business connection?” asked Louise. At the moment, she was more preoccupied by the talk she and Jonas would be having when he came home.
“No, that’s what you need to find out. But if he’s got something or other going on the side, then he might think it’s awfully convenient for his boring wife to be shoved out of the way in the slammer.”
“Take it easy,” Louise said.
She could see that Camilla had sat down on the floor with her back against the hotel’s striped wallpaper. The picture quality was fine now. She could even see the tears in the corner of her friend’s eye before they spilled over the edge.
“I just know that Britt didn’t set fire to that boathouse,” said Camilla, suddenly looking tired.
Louise was going to interrupt. They’d been through this before, and she’d begun to be irritated with Camilla’s insistence, especially considering that she was on the other side of the planet. She hadn’t even been anywhere near Britt since she lost her daughter.
“What is it you want us to dig up? The name of Ulrik’s lover, so you have something to hit him over the head with?” she asked, a bit more condescending than necessary.
“No, that’s not it,” Camilla answered, cross. “But if he’s living some kind of a double life, then there could be other things and other motives you’re not getting served up on a silver platter. It’s the same with Britt. You’ve been staring yourselves blind. What I’m trying to say is just that there could easily be others with a motive. What about the boys who stayed down there? What do you know about them?”
“What do they have to do with whoever Ulrik travels around the world with?”
“Nothing, probably, but I’m just saying there’s lots of things you haven’t considered at all. You didn’t know, for instance, that he had someone besides his wife.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“And you wouldn’t have found out about it, either, if I hadn’t told you.”
“No,” Louise confessed and nodded when Camilla said that that was precisely what wasn’t good enough if Britt sat in Vestre Prison. “You have to find out every damned thing. Otherwise she’ll end up being sentenced.”
“I don’t really have time for this sort of thing,” Louise began.
“Now hold on,” said Camilla. “Won’t you please go through everything? For my sake and for Britt’s. Everything that relates to that boathouse. I could have landed in her situation, and you could have, too. What if we hadn’t done it, and there was no one who believed in our innocence?”
She paused briefly.
“You need to try to prove that Britt didn’t do it. If you don’t find anything that points in another direction, and if she continues to take the blame herself, then that’s that. But at the very least we need to try to help her.”
Camilla took a deep breath and leaned her head back against the wall.
“You also need to understand something,” Louise said calmly. “Even people you believe in and trust are capable of killing. I think anyone can kill another person, if they’re driven far enough, and in Britt’s case the police are in possession of very strong evidence that she was driven all the way to that point.”
“Yes,” said Camilla, nodding. “I’ve thought about that, too, and it’s possible that that may be the case. But if no one thinks she’s innocent, then it’s just stuck there. Then she ends up sitting and waiting in jail until the sentence comes, and every day she’ll sit and know she’s in jail for something she didn’t do. Without having a chance to convince anyone around her about it. That’s what’ll happen if we don’t dig deeper and at the least rule out every imaginable possibility that could point to it not being her.”
“And then when the day comes that you have to confess that it damn well was her all along, you can relax with a good conscience because you did everything you could to help her. Is that what you’re saying?” asked Louise.
“Yes, that’s pretty much it,” Camilla admitted. “But we have a long way to go before we can relax.”
Louise heard a key in the door and paws jumping up.
“Hi!” she heard from the door as Jonas came in with the puppy in his arms.
“Hi!” Louise said, smiling, and asked if he’d like to Skype a little with Camilla and Markus.
“I’ll have a chat with Ulrik, and I’ll drive by Vestre tomorrow and talk with Britt,” Louise promised.
“Just call. We’ll be here a few days before we head out. Frederik has invited us to stay in his annex. After that we’re flying to Hawaii, where someone’s letting us borrow a house right on the beach.”
“Would that someone also be Frederik Sachs-Smith?” Louise asked.
“Yes, he’s awfully generous. Don’t you remember him? He went to Roskilde Cathedral School just like us, but he left the year we started. His siblings went down to Herlufsholm. It seems a standard high school education wasn’t good enough for them.”
Louise heard something softer and lighter in her friend’s voice when she spoke about her celebrated host, something that hinted at Camilla cozying up to the rich and famous. Louise didn’t know exactly what she thought of it, but considering the state her friend had been in before the trip, anything that brought more lightness and happiness into her voice was more than welcome.
“All right, then, have a nice trip,” she said.
Louise had long ago given up interfering in her friend’s private life.
“Here come two who want to say hello,” she said, scooting over for Jonas.
He lifted Dina affectionately to the web camera and smiled when Camilla and Markus completely melted over what a sweet dog she was.
Louise turned on the oven. She rinsed the roasting potatoes and rubbed them in oil, then laid them in an ovenproof dish with coarse salt on the bottom. After that, she opened a bottle of red wine, poured herself a glass, and called out to Station Bellahøj to get hold of Kent’s cell number.
“That computer you seized out at the boathouse, is it with you or has it been sent to NITEC?” she asked when she got him on the line.
“It’s in with them, but we didn’t ask them to find out what’s on it,” he apologized. “The boys were let go again, and it’ll be a long time before their case comes up.”
“That’s true. I’ll call down there myself and find out if they’ve even done anything with it,” she said.
He asked if there were something new, since she’d become interested in it.
“No,” Louise answered. “It just needs to be entered into the investigation. Right now, I’m trying to collect the threads.”
She didn’t think there was any reason to tell him that she wanted to investigate whether there’d been any correspondence between the boys in the boathouse and Signe’s father, or if there might be other relevant information on the computer that showed some other connection between them.
“Hang on while I get you the case number. That’ll make it quicker for them to find it for you,” he said.