27

THE NEXT MORNING WAS SET ASIDE TO question the photographer Tue Sunds. The questioning was going to take place at the Holbæk Police Station, so the plan was for Louise and Mik Rasmussen to pick him up in Copenhagen at eight and bring him out to the provinces. When she opened her eyes a couple of minutes after six-thirty, she fantasized for a minute about calling first just to make sure he’d be home, but she knew that idea was out of the question. Their arrival should catch him unawares. So she swung her legs out of bed and set her feet on the rough hotel carpet.

She quickly made herself a cup of Nescafé with the electric water heater with which she’d equipped the room; then she was ready to meet her partner. They had agreed that he would pick her up in front of the hotel at seven.

As Louise stood outside in the cold October morning air, she realized she had a couple of butterflies fluttering in her stomach. The drive to Copenhagen was going to be long, since she and Mik would be alone together in the car. The day before, Louise had dozed on and off, but today the silence in the car would be so oppressive there would be no way to keep it from feeling a little awkward, she thought, pacing a little to stay warm. The train station across the street was already in full swing. The waiting taxis had nothing to do, but the town’s commuters were busy trying to make their morning trains into the city.

She waved at him when he pulled over into the loading zone in front of the hotel, coming to a stop right next to the curb in front of her.

He had brought freshly buttered morning rolls with a thermos of coffee. The milk was in a little Tupperware pitcher, and she smiled at him when he told her to help herself. She hoped to herself that he had inherited the pitcher from his mother. There was just no way she was going to have a thing with a man who bought himself Tupperware products, she thought, ruefully acknowledging that she might already have done precisely that.

“How thoughtful. Did you get up early?” Louise asked, and by the time she had poured coffee for both of them, Mik was already heading down Roskildevej toward the highway at a decent pace.

“Yeah, you could say that,” he said with fatigue and explained that one of the puppies had been having stomach trouble all night and had had diarrhea all over the hallway and kitchen.

“It’s unbelievable what all can fit into such a small tummy,” he said. “But the little guy was whimpering so much that in the end I had to call the vet.”

Louise looked at him with concern and offered to drive, because now that made it two nights in a row he hadn’t gotten more than a couple of hours of sleep, but he shook his head and said that he still had a little bit of charge left in his batteries.

“How’s the puppy now? Is he doing any better?” It was hard not to be concerned about the little furball.

“He was sleeping when I left,” Mik said and added that he’d enlisted his neighbor, who would look after things until he got home.

Louise smiled at him. After all that, he’d still managed to bring coffee and rolls for them. She gradually started to relax.

It was five minutes to eight when they rang the doorbell of Tue Sunds’s large penthouse apartment, which was unsurprisingly located in the heart of an exclusive part of the inner city, right up under the roof of an old red building on Grønnegade. It was a combination apartment and photo studio, as far as Louise had understood from Dicta the night she picked her up in front of Holbæk Station.

They had to ring the buzzer several times before the photographer came and opened the door, barefoot and dressed in a bathrobe. They’d obviously caught him in bed, and Louise had the fleeting thought that now she would be confronted with whatever new young model had taken Dicta’s place. But her thought was interrupted when Mik spoke.

“Tue Sunds?” he asked.

The photographer nodded.

“We’re from the Unit One Mobile Task Force,” Louise continued, really pulling herself together to be polite. “We’re working on a serious murder case. Do you have anything against coming back to the station with us for questioning?”

Sunds took a step back and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Yes, I do. Now just isn’t a good time,” he responded, shaking his head a little. “Can’t do it. I’ve got appointments all day.”

“Would it be possible to move the appointments to another day?” Louise continued, in the same polite tone, avoiding looking at Mik.

“No, it’s not something you can just rebook,” he said with a touch of condescension and amazement that she could even imagine his being a man with appointments that could just be changed at a moment’s notice.

Now Mik took over. “Yes, well, let me phrase it this way. If you don’t accompany us of your own free will, we will be forced to place you under arrest.”

Louise looked at her partner. There was quite a contrast between the cheerful, considerate side of him that she had begun to get to know—the way he treated the high-school teacher, herself, and, for that matter, his dogs—and the way he dealt with people professionally when it came to situations like this.

“Then you’ll have to arrest me,” the long-haired photographer responded provocatively, his unwillingness radiating from him.

“This pertains to Dicta Møller, who was found murdered in a parking lot in Holbæk yesterday morning,” Louise said. She hoped that opening the bag all the way would make him see that now was not the right time to be flexing his muscles. “We know you knew her, and that you were supposed to get together Saturday night, but that you canceled your get-together.”

He seemed puzzled about how she knew this, but didn’t ask. Seething, he pulled his bathrobe tighter, like a coat.

“Dicta?” he said, making them repeat that she was the one they were referring to.

“You know the person we’re talking about?” Mik asked.

The photographer responded with a nod and confirmed that he knew the girl, but said he did not know she’d been murdered. He also confirmed that he had canceled a get-together with her, but did not provide any more details.

“It can hardly have escaped your notice that she died,” Louise interjected. “She is one of your models, and her face was in all the news broadcasts last night, and she’s front-page news today.”

“I haven’t seen them,” he responded standoffishly, casting a glance down at the newspapers lying on his doorstep. One of his own photographs showed her young face. He walked over, picked up the papers, and started reading one.

Mik took the newspaper out of his hand and said that he would accompany Tue inside his apartment while he put some clothes on.

Louise was following Tue Sunds’s facial expressions with interest, but there was very little going on in that taut, polished, sunburned face. He’s older than you’d think, it occurred to her, guessing that the photographer wanted to appear younger than he really was. That being the case, the Bordeaux-and-black-striped terry cloth bathrobe didn’t suit him at all.

He was more respectably attired when Mik came back down with him five minutes later. Once on the street, Louise climbed into the back seat with him. He didn’t ask what had happened to Dicta until they’d crossed Kongens Nytorv and were on their way along Kalvebod Wharf.

“We’ll talk about that once we get to Holbæk,” Louise responded tersely.

At first the photographer sat with his teeth clenched, watching the heavy morning traffic coming toward them, but once they were out on the highway, he leaned his head back and closed his eyes and sat like that, off in his own world, the rest of the way to Holbæk.

Louise grabbed a mineral water, a pitcher of coffee, and two cups before walking in and turning on her laptop. She’d sent Mik home to check on his dogs and rest for a bit while she handled the questioning session with the photographer. At first her partner had been reluctant to accept the offer, but ultimately he’d conceded.

Tue Sunds was pacing around restlessly when she entered the office. She asked him to have a seat and offered him coffee. As she poured, she asked if she could get him anything to eat. They had taken him right out of bed, so he hadn’t had any breakfast yet.

He sat down and accepted her offer. Out in the hallway she ran into Velin and asked if he could bring some bread from the caféteria while she prepared to question the photographer who had taken the page-nine picture of Dicta. Five minutes later, there were two slices of French bread on a white paper plate, butter and marmalade each in small packets next to it, and they were ready to get started.

“I’m rather surprised to be here,” Sunds started as he opened the butter packet. “I don’t have a damn thing to do with this case.”

Louise could see that he was starting to build up some resentment, which she hurried to quash by saying that she didn’t think he did either.

“Well, then, why am I here?” he asked.

“Because I would really like to hear you tell me about your relationship with Dicta. You sent her some messages rejecting her quite cruelly last Saturday after you canceled your appointment, and you weren’t particularly eager to come when we asked you to.”

“Yeah, but do you suspect I killed her? Because that’s totally absurd,” he continued. “It’s true that I wasn’t able to see her last Saturday after all, and maybe I was a little harsh when she didn’t seem to be getting the message, but I didn’t see her at all that day, so there’s no way I could have murdered her.”

Louise let him talk for a bit until she asked him to tell her why she should believe that he hadn’t committed the murder.

He was puzzled for a moment, but then started talking again.

“First and foremost, I wasn’t in Holbæk. Besides that, I actually liked her.”

Now this was starting to get interesting, Louise thought.

“It would also be totally foolhardy to take the life of a model I actually thought I could make some money from,” he continued.

Louise smiled at that last one, which was stated in a slightly milder tone, with a hint of irony.

“Obviously,” she said. “And that’s exactly the type of thing that would help convince us that you’re not our murderer. So if you don’t have any objections, I’d like to ask you a few questions that might help me shed a little light on Dicta’s life and your relationship with her.”

He nodded that that was fine. It would have been pointless for him to respond any other way, Louise thought.

“How did you come to be in touch with Dicta Møller?” Louise asked after Tue Sunds had eaten both slices of bread. And when he didn’t respond, she continued, “How does a young girl with no contacts in Copenhagen find her way to you specifically? You’re not that famous, are you?” she asked and leaned back a little to take the sting out of her words.

He cleared his throat before answering. “No, of course she didn’t know me.” He smiled with exaggerated modesty. “But I understood from her that she subscribes to both Sirene and Bazaar magazines, and I’ve had big fashion spreads in both magazines in the last few months. That’s where she came across my name, and with that information it wasn’t hard for her to find me online.”

Louise was familiar with the two fashion magazines targeted at teenage girls.

“So she called you?” she asked, looking him in the eye as he slowly nodded.

“Yes, she called my studio.”

“Is that normal, for young girls to call you that way? If that were the case, I’d imagine you’d probably spend all your time doing nothing other than taking calls from starry-eyed teenage girls.”

He smiled a bit and shook his head. “It’s not normal at all. I thought it was quite impressive that she had the guts. They usually send their pictures to the modeling agencies. But Dicta wanted to hire me to shoot a few portfolio shots of her that she could use for submissions. She was very ambitious, and I could tell that she was really willing to fight to make her dream into a reality.”

“What was she supposed to pay for them?” Louise wanted to know.

“Normally six thousand Danish crowns. That’s the price for the shoot. But I said I’d do them for her for three thousand crowns. She paid for them with her confirmation money.”

“And did she then owe you the other half?”

Sunds fidgeted imperceptibly in the chair and let his hands rest on the desk. Then he shook his head. “No,” he replied. “There was nothing about how I’d bill her for the rest if she made it big. Three thousand crowns was the agreed price.”

Louise sat for a little while, watching him, but couldn’t interpret his composed face as he sat there looking at her with his bright blue eyes. Then he leaned back and wove his fingers together behind his head.

“What you’re really asking me is if I was expecting anything else from her because I offered to do her pictures for half price,” he said, and now he was the one whose eyes pierced Louise.

She nodded and waited.

He sat and thought for a moment before he again began to speak. “I have an eighteen-year-old daughter. I got divorced from her mother four years ago, and one of her friends was spending a lot of time at our house around that time. My own daughter never harbored any dreams of becoming a model. She wants to be a veterinarian and just started veterinary school, but her friend was very taken with the modeling world and used to tag along in the studio when I was working with professional models. I actually thought she was thinking about becoming a photographer, that’s why I let her watch. But she wanted to be a model and kept pressuring me to give her a break, like under the table, even though I explained that I couldn’t just start using a completely unknown girl when magazines booked me for an assignment. Besides, they choose their own models.”

He paused for a moment before completing his story by explaining that one day his daughter’s friend had gone to the police and reported him for rape, and at the same time she let the story leak out. She couldn’t be charged with making a false statement because of her age, but she was examined by a gynecologist and the exam showed that she wasn’t telling the truth. Although it happens that the hymen can remain intact after a rape, it is rare, and after the events she described it certainly wouldn’t have been possible.

“I didn’t do anything more about it, apart from talking to her parents, because the most important thing for me was that they understood that the story was a lie. I’ve always gone out of my way to treat young models considerately.”

Louise had a copy of the police report in front of her. Ruth had had it waiting when they got back from Copenhagen, and Louise could see that a caseworker had been there during the questioning, which was standard procedure whenever someone underage was involved. Something had obviously gone wrong in terms of updating the case, because it didn’t say anywhere in the paperwork that the preliminary charge had been found to be baseless.

“There’s also a report of assault?” Louise said, pulling out another piece of paper.

“The same day the girl went to the police, she sent an e-mail out to several of the magazines and papers I work for and to the biggest modeling agencies in the city, telling her story.”

There was something generous about the way he talked about her, as if he didn’t really want to accuse her of such poor behavior.

“She was a little girl, and my daughter’s friend. At that point, my daughter didn’t have any room for more upheaval in her life.”

Louise was starting to get irritated, but reined herself in. He was almost being too selfless about what he’d been subjected to for Louise to take him seriously.

“You beat a man down so severely that he was in the hospital for a long time with facial fractures,” she fished, to put an end to what she interpreted as a self-aggrandizing defense soliloquy.

He nodded.

“The story about the girl was making its way around the city. A few people knew how it all fit together. I got the girl’s parents to write a letter to the people the girl had contacted, in which they explained that the report was made up. But not everyone who had heard the story received such a letter and the incident you mention happened one night after I’d had a little too much to drink and was maybe a little touchier than usual, so it all got out of hand when another photographer started egging me on.”

Louise nodded and asked him to explain in more detail.

“There’s nothing more to say. I just couldn’t stand to listen to any more whispering behind my back and didn’t feel like I should have to keep defending myself for something I didn’t do. So my temper got away from me.”

Louise nodded and proceeded.

“Did Dicta have what it takes to make it as a model?” Louise asked, picturing the tall girl with the prominent cheekbones. Louise had no doubt that the girl had radiated charisma and the boys certainly turned to look at her in the street, but forging a career was a totally different matter.

He contemplated that for a bit before he started nodding.

“I think she had a reasonable shot. She was just too impatient. She expected the agencies to line up the instant they heard about her, and it just isn’t that easy,” he said. “She apparently posed a little for a photographer up here and he succeeded in building up her image of herself into something really amazing in her own mind, but reality isn’t like that.”

“She was actually used as a model here in town,” Louise said to vindicate Dicta a little.

“It’s a hell of a long way from a picture in a free small-town newspaper to the big magazines,” he said, and in an instant arrogance swept the relaxed look off his face.

“Well, actually, it was Venstrebladet,” Louise pointed out, grabbing the chance for a new angle. “Give me an idea how many visits it takes to a celebrity photographer to get three thousand crowns’ worth of portfolio pictures.”

That shook him a little, but he didn’t respond.

“And does it often happen that you drag it out all day and invite them out for sushi and other goodies after the pictures are taken?”

He didn’t say anything, so she kept going.

“Last Saturday around 11:00 P.M., I ran into Dicta in front of the train station here in Holbæk. She was so drunk, she was hunched over in the middle of the bike racks throwing up.”

He was about to say something when she interrupted him and kept going, her voice still calm and steady.

“A visit to a café and sushi up in your penthouse apartment. Why did you want to impress her when she was already in high spirits from the adventure she had set out on?”

He sat there with a wrinkle in his brow, which showed that his rage was building; she discreetly followed his attempts to control it.

“I think you misunderstood that,” he said finally. “Did she tell you that story? It’s true that we ate brunch and that I invited her out for a glass of champagne after the pictures were taken. I usually do that when I wrap up a job.”

“But she made up the part about your opening multiple bottles that night?” Louise asked, watching him.

He nodded.

“Did she also make up your eating sushi together?”

He said that Dicta had been hungry before she went home.

“She had the money to pay you three thousand crowns, but not to buy herself a hot dog at Nørreport Station?” Louise let the question hang in the air, and then continued: “How many times did you see her that day?”

She could see that he was going to deny that he had seen her at all since then, so she reformulated the question. “How many times did you have contact with her?”

He remained silent.

“She came by a couple of times,” he finally said, “so we could pick which pictures would go in her portfolio. But otherwise I didn’t see her.”

“Did you agree to her sending that picture to Ekstra Bladet?” Finally some response was visible in his eyes. They squinted, nearly closed, and darkened. “What fucking picture?”

Louise explained about his picture of Dicta appearing in Ekstra Bladet.

“I didn’t fucking send in any picture. How do you think it makes me look if people see my name next to a page-nine girl?” he asked, outraged and angry.

Louise couldn’t restrain herself. “I don’t give a rat’s ass how you look. How do you think Dicta looks? Now, you tell me what the fuck went on between the two of you. I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about you and your actual intentions.”

He pulled back slightly in his chair and seemed more surprised than threatened.

“There’s nothing else to tell.”

Louise took a deep breath before she spoke again.

“I’m sorry I got all worked up. But I actually knew Dicta Møller in connection with another case we’re working on, and it was terrible to see her lying down there in the parking lot with her skull crushed.”

He had once more pulled his compassionate look down over his face when he said that that was perfectly all right, but his eyes were hard again when Louise repeated the question about how his photo of an undressed Dicta had ended up in Ekstra Bladet.

“She must have sent it in herself,” he said, almost snorting the words.

Louise stood up to go check with Storm if it might not be a good idea to hold off on pressing Tue Sunds any harder until they’d ransacked Dicta’s room and had maybe found more that would help them get a picture of the relationship the two of them had had.

“Agreed,” Storm said and then told her that Dean had been in touch with Ekstra Bladet’s photo editor, who had just gotten back to him with the information that the picture had been sent in by the girl herself with a return envelope that was addressed to her own address. Dean had also checked that the account the money was supposed to be deposited into was Dicta’s.

Louise leaned against the wall and stood there for a moment, feeling how the energy that had been coursing through her during Tue Sunds’s questioning had now suddenly left her body.

Storm left her in the hallway. He was going to see Søren Velin, who was studying Dicta’s laptop with a technician.

Louise returned to her office and told Tue Sunds that an officer would be ready to take him back to the city within ten minutes. She held out her hand politely and thanked him for coming in.

“Did I really have any choice?” he asked, as he gathered his white sweater up off the floor, where it had slid, and tied it around his waist.

“Yes, you could have refused. Then we would have been forced to arrest you, and then I wouldn’t have thanked you so nicely afterward,” she replied, following him out.