“YOU’RE AWFULLY QUIET tonight.”
Martin Duvall let go of the gear shift and rested his hand on Heloise’s thigh. His gaze alternated between her and Vigerslev Allé, which extended ahead of them like one long, streetlight-flanked icicle, stridently cold and colorless, one of greater Copenhagen’s most disheartening stretches of roadway.
He lovingly caressed the denim, following her thigh muscles with his fingers from kneecap to hip. “Are you okay?”
Heloise nodded. “I’m just tired,” she said and turned her face to the passenger’s side window.
She hadn’t told him about the pregnancy or the argument with Gerda, but both had settled around her like a spiderweb, adhering to her thoughts.
Was Gerda right?
Was Heloise clinging to her like the last living shred of something that had once given life value?
Heloise had hidden the pill with her other medications in the drawer in the bathroom back home. She knew Martin was going to Stockholm for work for a couple of days the following week. She would get it over with before he came home again. It would be as if it had never happened.
“Are you looking forward to seeing Connie?” Martin asked.
“Mm-hmm.” Heloise pulled her leg away a little. “It sucks that it’ll only be the three of us, though.”
The dinner get-together had been on the calendar for months, but Connie had told her that Schäfer wouldn’t be able to make it after all. The Lukas Bjerre investigation was such a high priority for the investigations unit that he needed to work around the clock. At first Heloise had suggested postponing the dinner to another night, but Connie had sounded so disappointed at the idea that Heloise had immediately said that they would come as planned.
Truth be told, she needed an evening with Schäfer and Connie. Whenever she stepped over their threshold, it was always like something happened to her. Her shoulders automatically relaxed, and she was able to breath more deeply, right down into her belly. It just felt … nice, like coming home.
Martin tightened his grip a little on Heloise’s kneecap to get her attention as they waited at the corner of Vestre Cemetery.
She involuntarily twitched her leg. “What?”
“Don’t you think we ought to take a long weekend somewhere soon?” he asked. “Don’t we need that?”
“We were just at the summer house.”
“Yes, and that was nice, but … I was thinking about a quick trip abroad, to Paris or something like that. Wouldn’t that be great?”
Heloise instantly held her breath in the passenger’s seat beside him.
She hadn’t been to Paris since the previous year, when she had said her final farewell to her father. She had kept away from the city for years—even long before his death—because it reminded her of everything that had fallen apart in her life. When other people thought about Paris, they thought of “La Vie en Rose” and strolling along the Seine. Heloise heard the name of the city and thought: The blue pill or the red pill? Which would you choose?
But it wasn’t her choice to fall into a bottomless pit. It was more like she had been force-fed a reality that she hadn’t known existed and then she was suddenly left parentless. The shock and anger had left her with a new, gloomier view of the world and a heart that had been ripped in half. Nothing was the way she had thought.
Martin eyed her questioningly and his face immediately clenched up in remorse.
“Oh, sorry. I wasn’t thinking. That was stupid of me.”
Heloise half-heartedly shook her head and brushed his comment aside. “That’s okay.”
“No, that was thoughtless of me. Forget about Paris! But how about London? Or Barcelona? I bet it’s warm and sunny in Spain right now. We could zip down there this spring—eat tapas, drink sangria, and shag like rabbits.” He put a hand behind Heloise’s head and pulled her in for a kiss. “What do you say?”
“It’s green.”
“I’m sorry?”
Heloise pointed to the traffic light. “It’s green!”
Martin let go of her and stepped gently on the accelerator. In the middle of the intersection, they were passed on the right at high speed by a red BMW that only avoided hitting their right-side mirror by a few inches. Martin hit the horn with his fist and held it down as he exploded at the driver, who was already long gone.
“What the hell are you doing, asshole?!”
Heloise could see how much effort it took for him to calm himself down again. His pulse pounded visibly in his exposed neck, and he was gritting his teeth. He took a deep breath and then slowly exhaled.
“Anyway, where were we … Barcelona,” he said, once again sounding under control and looking over at Heloise. “What do you think?”
“I’ve got a lot going on at work right now,” she replied. “Maybe later in the year.”
Heloise looked out the windshield and she could feel Martin’s eyes on her for a long moment. But he didn’t say anything else.
They turned left onto Strindbergsvej and were halfway down the long residential street when Heloise pointed ahead of them in surprise.
“Hey, Schäfer’s car is here!”
They pulled up in front of the little house, where Martin’s dark blue Tesla nearly kissed the bumper of Schäfer’s battered Opel.
Heloise peered over at the house, where a warm, orangey glow spilled out of all the windows.
“I think he’s home after all,” she said happily.
She undid her seat belt and hopped out of the car before Martin had turned off the engine. She pushed open the gate in front of the red brick house and was halfway down the front walk when she spotted the glow lighting up the darkness on the patio. Half hidden under the cantilever roof, Schäfer was leaning against the wall. He had turned his collar up to cover his ears and had a cigarette in his mouth. He was lost in his own thoughts.
“Schäfer?” she called.
His head flew up with a start, and Heloise could see his teeth, brightening the darkness as he smiled.
“Ah, there you are!” he said. He walked over and picked Heloise up in a bear hug, so her feet dangled in midair for a few seconds.
He was a big man, a whole head taller than Heloise’s five foot nine, and he smelled of cigarettes and cheap aftershave. Heloise always felt a bit tipsy in his company, safe and comfortable. You didn’t need to be Freud to figure out how things stood.
“You smell like Old Spice,” she said and smiled.
“Mm-hmm. The scent of a real man.” Schäfer winked.
He reached out his bear paw to Martin, who had caught up with Heloise.
“Duvall,” he said and nodded.
“Hi, Erik.”
“It’s great to see you.”
“We didn’t think you were going to be here,” Heloise said.
“I’m home for a few hours before I head over to NKC.”
“NKC?” Martin asked.
“The National Forensic Center.”
“I bet it’s all hands on deck right now because of that boy you’re looking for,” Heloise said.
Schäfer nodded and took a long drag from his cigarette.
“Shouldn’t you be giving that nonsense up?” She nodded at the cigarette in his hand.
“Now don’t you start, too,” he said. “Connie is always after me. How about you, Duvall? You smoke, too. Do you get chewed out as well?”
“No, actually, I don’t,” Martin said, giving Heloise a teasing smile. “But I can’t figure out if that’s because Heloise loves me as I am or if she just doesn’t care if I die prematurely.”
“The latter,” Heloise said.
It was meant as a joke, but her statement hung in the air for several seconds with a surprising bite to it, as if they both knew that it was the only honest thing she had said all evening.
“Oh, I doubt that,” Schäfer said and put his cigarette out in a pail of sand that sat on the patio. “Come on. Let’s go inside. Connie’s pacing around in there counting the seconds. She’s been working her magic in the kitchen all day.” He rested his hand on the back of Heloise’s head. “It was really sweet of you not to cancel. She’s been looking forward to seeing you.”
The front door opened just then and Schäfer’s wife stuck her big, dark head of hair out.
“Heloise!” she squealed and enveloped her in a hug.
“Hi, Connie,” Heloise smiled.
“Oh, it’s been too long, girl! We’ve missed you.” Her Caribbean accent flowed like thick caramel sauce over her vowels as she spoke Danish.
She released Heloise and turned to Martin.
“And who is this handsome young man you’ve brought with you this time?”
The question was meant as a joke. Connie had met Martin many times and had often elbowed Heloise in the side when they were alone, whispering to her that he was a keeper.
Schäfer was hardly as dazzled. In the beginning Heloise had thought that it was the packaging he took some dislike to. Martin was attractive in a way that made most men think he was either gay or someone who could use a good kick in the pants. He was simply too good looking, too … perfect! But for Schäfer the problem was rather that Martin had a criminal record, an old assault conviction. A thirty-day sentence for knocking out four of his ex-wife’s lover’s teeth, a fact that Schäfer reminded Heloise of every chance he got.
He didn’t trust Martin Duvall, case closed.
Martin greeted Connie warmly and they were quickly pulled inside for the festive Cajun-Creole meal Connie had prepared. There was Caribbean gumbo with okra and tiger prawns, homemade cornbread, fried chicken, papaya salad, and a dish Connie presented as buttermilk biscuits with mushroom gravy and grated cheddar. All the courses were served in colorful, glazed tureens and bowls on the small, round dining room table. The chandelier over the table was dimmed and a pleasant, euphoric saxophone blared from the speakers.
Heloise felt completely relaxed as Schäfer pulled out a chair for her and asked her to have a seat.
They ate and talked about the food and the trip Schäfer and Connie had just returned home from. About the weather, the ungodly Danish winter darkness. About Martin’s new job in the editorial offices at DR in Christiansborg, about politics, and about the cherry color Connie had painted the kitchen walls to Schäfer’s profound dismay.
Then Heloise asked the question she had been working herself up to ever since she had seen Schäfer’s car parked out front.
“So, how are things at work?” She looked at him over the rim of her wineglass. “Are you making any headway in your current case?”
He finished chewing whatever was in his mouth before he answered. Heloise knew him well enough to know that the long pause was not due to good table manners.
“We don’t have anything concrete yet,” he said.
“But I understand you had Kronprinsessegade sealed off last night and the Citadel this morning. The newspaper’s sources say that you found evidence in a trash can and in the moat. Is that right?”
Schäfer stuck his fork into a prawn the size of a Shetland pony and stuffed it into his mouth. His eyes met Heloise’s as he chewed. He was smiling warmly, but Heloise could see in his eyes that he was having reservations. After he swallowed his mouthful, he said nothing.
“More red wine?” Connie asked, sensing that they were moving out into an opium field packed full of land mines.
“Have you heard about Heloise’s promotion?” Martin asked, holding his glass out to Connie.
Schäfer raised both eyebrows, and Connie gasped excitedly.
“Promotion?”
Heloise was just as surprised as the other two and looked at Martin.
“What?” he asked. “Am I not allowed to brag about my girlfriend?”
“Well, but … it’s not a promotion.”
“I think it is,” Martin said and explained the situation to Schäfer and Connie. “They changed the workflow for the paper’s investigative team, so now Heloise gets to decide what she’s going to cover. Things aren’t divided up as much as they were before, so she doesn’t need to stick to business topics anymore.”
Connie nodded with interest as Martin spoke, eager to celebrate a work change that she didn’t quite understand.
“And this is something new?” she asked. “That you can cover other topics?”
Heloise shrugged. “Yes and no. I’ve written a lot of different things for the paper, but I’ve mostly covered business.”
“And now you have free rein to write about whatever you want?”
“That’s the idea anyway,” Heloise said, thinking about Karen Aagaard’s orders to cover the Lukas Bjerre case.
“So what are you working on right now?” Schäfer asked.
“A story about PTSD, about the scars soldiers carry in their hearts after they’ve been to war.”
She regretted her lie the second she had uttered it out loud.
“That’s wonderful, Heloise,” Connie said. “We’re so proud of you.”
Schäfer nodded in agreement.
“You’re sweet, but it doesn’t come with any pay raise so it’s no big deal.”
“Sure it is,” Connie insisted. “You should be proud of yourself. You’re a good journalist. You know, whenever we see your name in the paper we read every word. Erik especially follows you religiously. You’ve practically become the daughter we never had.”
“Why didn’t you ever have children?” Martin asked.
“Martin,” Heloise said, giving him a stern look.
“Sorry, I …” He looked back and forth between them. “I didn’t mean to …”
“That’s okay,” Connie smiled. “It’s a fair question. We really wanted to have kids, but for some reason … well, it never worked out.”
She put her hand on top of Schäfer’s. Her dark hands were slender and her nails a natural pink. She wore a gold ring on each finger. Jewelry from Saint Lucia, Heloise guessed, with Caribbean patterns and bright stones.
“We tried for many years, and I got pregnant several times, too. But then each time it was just gone before it ever really got going, so …” She shrugged with the kind of forced ease you develop after many years of grief. “It just wasn’t meant to be.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Martin said.
“Yes, it’s a sad tale,” Schäfer said with a nod. “But then we have so many other good things in our lives, don’t we, honey? We just returned from the most wonderful vacation. There’s wine in our glasses, gumbo on our plates, and nice people over to visit.” He glanced over at Heloise and Martin. “And Connie hasn’t kicked me out the door yet, after twenty-nine years of living together.”
He lifted her hand and gave it a kiss.
“How about you?” Connie asked. “Are kids something you’re planning on?”
Heloise and Schäfer’s eyes met over the table. She could see that he knew where she stood. But there was also something else in his gaze—it moved fleetingly to her belly as if he could see right through her—and she couldn’t help wonder: How much did he know?
In many ways Schäfer knew her better than did the man she was with. Martin seemed night-blind in Heloise’s darkness—immune to the numerous rejections that lately had gone from being subtle to big, flashing neon signs.
Martin seemed uncomfortable in his chair, filled with an expectant restlessness.
“Well, yes … That’s something we need to get going on soon,” he said and smiled.
“Duvall,” Schäfer said, putting an end to the conversation by smacking the palm of his hand on the table. “Do you want to pop outside with me for a smoke before I need to run off again?”
Martin grabbed his wineglass and stood up.
The men quickly put on their coats and disappeared out onto the patio. Heloise pictured Martin standing formally out there, eager to impress, like a suitor seeking a father’s blessing.
She and Connie started clearing the dishes from the table.
“He’s a handsome guy, your Martin.”
“He is,” Heloise agreed.
“Do you love him?”
Heloise smiled. “Sometimes.”
“Mm-hmm.” Connie nodded knowingly and took the tray that was leaning against one corner of the sofa. “He seems very much in love with you.”
Heloise glanced out at the patio but couldn’t see the men out there. “Schäfer doesn’t seem to like him,” she said with a shrug.
“I wouldn’t worry about that. Erik doesn’t like lots of people.”
Heloise laughed. “But you have something really special together, the two of you.”
“Yes.” Connie nodded. “We do.”
“What’s your secret?”
Connie smiled. Her teeth were a brilliant white against the pink of her gums. “Der’ is no secret, girl,” she declared in her lilting French-Creole dialect. “We treat each other nicely. We laugh together. We do the deed.” She winked. “Dat’s all!”
“Connie!” Heloise squealed and put her hands over her ears.
“Oh, please,” Connie said with a smile. “Erik might not have the classic good looks your Martin does, but he is all man!”
“Stop, stop!” Heloise laughed. “I’m just going to go visit your restroom, and when I get back, we will never speak of this again, okay?”
Connie laughed heartily and pushed her cheerfully off toward the guest bathroom with a hand.
Heloise’s smile vanished as soon as she closed the bathroom door behind her, and she anxiously touched her abdomen. She felt an ominous discomfort, as if her uterus were an old, arthritic hand trying to form a fist.
The seconds ticked by as she waited for the pain to pass.
When it was over, she washed her hands and splashed cold water on her face. She found herself looking into her own eyes in her reflection and bit her lower lip. Gerda’s words echoed in her head.
You’re a hypocrite, Heloise.
“Fuck you,” she muttered, but wasn’t sure who she was talking to. When she closed the bathroom door behind her and turned off the light, she could hear Connie singing in the kitchen and the dishes clinking against each other as she placed them in the dishwasher. She looked around the dark hallway, lit up only by a three-armed sconce mounted on the wall, which was covered with a wallpaper with a large floral pattern.
Then she spotted it.
The case file.
It sat with Schäfer’s car keys and police badge on a cream-colored table with curved legs in the middle of the hallway.
Heloise peered out at the patio and listened carefully. She could hear Martin’s laughter out there, obtrusive and too loud, and Schäfer’s mellow chuckle. Connie was still clattering around in the kitchen at the other end of the house and humming along to an old Dionne Warwick number that was playing on the sound system.
Heloise debated with herself in the mirror on the wall over the case file. For and against, back and forth. Then she turned off the voices in her head and hastily decided. She could help Schäfer if she knew a little more about the case.
She held her breath and opened the folder.
Her heart pounded in her chest, like accelerating beats on a bass drum, as she flipped through the papers. She skimmed the pages in the soft light and latched onto individual words and sentences. She tried to memorize what she saw, tried to decode Schäfer’s chicken scratch:
Jacket found at the Citadel. iPhone … Pareidolia. Who has a motive to kill or kidnap? … Who is Kiki—is there a conflict? … Anne Sofie Bjerre, alcoholism …
Alcoholism, Heloise thought. Did Lukas’s mother drink? Gerda had never mentioned that.
She heard a sound from the front door and looked up with a start. When it didn’t open, she quickly went back to flipping through the file.
Come on, come on. Give me something, she thought, something concrete.
Then she stiffened.
On the very last page of the case file there was a picture of an old, dilapidated barn door that looked like a creepy face. The picture triggered a strange, silent echo in her, a delayed glimmer of light that seemed as if it had traveled across an inner galaxy.
She read Schäfer’s notes under the picture:
Where is this place? Lukas is hunting for faces, pareidolia. Whose face does he see here? His attacker’s?
Pareidolia, Heloise thought. What did that mean again … something about faces? She vaguely remembered having seen the term on Instagram at some point. She took a picture of the barn door on her cell phone. Then she closed the file and walked quickly back to the living room.
“… not a darn thing.” Schäfer laughed as the front door opened.
“You’re wrong,” Martin protested. “He’s the only one at Borgen who knows what he’s doing, and he’s one of the good guys: right wing when it comes to the redistribution of income and wealth, left wing when it comes to the climate. The best of both worlds.”
“He’s a politician.” Schäfer spat the word out like a clump of infected mucus. “Makes him a douchebag in my book.”
“Time-out,” Heloise laughed and walked into Martin’s embrace. “You can’t talk about politics anymore or we’ll never be invited back.”
“They don’t understand what’s going on out in the streets,” Schäfer continued, unmoved. “Send all the politicians to Vollsmose after dark and let them try to implement their so-called integration plans. Let the Alternative dance boogie-woogie down Blågårdsgade blowing bubbles with their noses. I’d like to see if a politician like Uffe Elbæk still thinks the whole thing is hilarious once he’s taken a cobblestone in the head.”
“There, there, baby.” Connie came into the living room. She was carrying a pineapple cake and a pitcher of coffee on a tray. “Don’t scare our guests away now.”
“It’s okay,” Heloise said. “I stopped engaging in politics a long time ago. It’s all bullshit anyway.”
“It’s not bullshit,” Martin protested.
Schäfer smiled indulgently and patted him on the shoulder.
“You mean well, Duvall, and you get points for that. But I’m afraid that I have to agree with Heloise.” He took out his phone and read a text that he had just received. Then he reached out to Heloise and pulled her into a goodbye hug. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
“Always,” she said, hoping that he couldn’t see through her deceitful smile to sense her guilty conscience.
Schäfer kissed Connie goodbye and then drove away for his late-night work appointment. Heloise and Martin stayed for another hour while they ate cake and looked at vacation pictures from Saint Lucia on Connie’s phone.
“It looks amazing,” Heloise said.
“It’s the most beautiful place in the world.” Connie nodded. “You have to come visit us over there someday. We have a little guest room you can stay in.”
“We’d love to,” Martin said. “Wouldn’t we, Helo?”
Heloise smiled but didn’t respond. Instead, she set down the phone and said, “Thank you so much for this lovely dinner, Connie. It was wonderful to see you.”
They said their goodbyes and Heloise promised to stop by again soon.
As soon as she sat down in the car with Martin, and they pulled away from the curb, headed back toward downtown, she pulled out her phone and found the picture of the barn door. It felt as if the temperature in the car dropped as she stared at it and her fingertips began to throb.
Those round porthole windows, that pursed iron mouth.
She recognized the place.
She had been there.