“EXCUSE ME.”
On her way back out of the coatroom at the medical clinic Heloise nodded politely to a short young man. He had actually been the one who had just bumped into her with his elbow as he wrapped his Moncler scarf around his neck.
The man didn’t say anything.
He started buttoning up his coat and glanced at Heloise’s battered face in the mirror next to the row of coat hooks.
She stopped and made of point of staring at him. “I said, excuse me.”
The man turned his head and gave her a questioning look. “Uh … okay.”
“Okay? Did you just say okay?”
“Yes, okay. It’s all right!”
Heloise scrunched up her eyes. “Are you kidding me?”
The man looked at her as if she were insane. He glanced quickly over his shoulder to see if she was really talking to him. “I’m sorry?”
“Exactly, you effing doofus. Remember that next time!”
“Just what is going on in here?” a voice asked from behind, its intonation biting.
Heloise turned toward the sound.
The gray-haired medical secretary with stern, penciled-in eyebrows stood in the doorway to the coatroom eyeing them.
“What’s going on in here?” she asked again. “Is everything all right, Jonas?”
The man with the scarf nodded and stepped past Heloise.
The secretary gave him a friendly smile. “Call after nine AM on Monday. The results should be back by then.”
The man thanked her and left the clinic. Then the secretary turned to Heloise and eyed her coolly.
“I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but here in this clinic we speak kindly to one another. And besides, we’re closing now, so if you could please—”
“It’s me, Heloise Kaldan … I’m one of Dr. Bjerre’s patients.”
The woman’s expression changed, and her pink lips parted in astonishment.
“Oh my Lord, I hardly recognized you.” She took a step closer to Heloise and put on the eyeglasses that had been hanging around her neck on a long pearl necklace. She studied Heloise’s face with a concerned expression. “What happened?”
Heloise made a noise that sounded like a combination of a sneeze and a laugh. “Would you believe me if I said I’d walked into a door?”
The woman looked into Heloise’s eyes. Then she removed her glasses again. “Who did this to you?”
“I just want to know if you can fix it and if you have time to do it now,” Heloise said.
The woman pointed to Heloise’s split eyebrow. “We can put a single stitch there, so the wound doesn’t keep reopening.”
“Great. Thanks!”
“But Jens isn’t here, so it’ll be Pelle Laursen who does it. He’s in with his last patient right now, but if you’ll have a seat and wait …” She nodded toward the waiting room. “You can help yourself to a cup of coffee or tea if you’d like.”
Heloise walked into the waiting room. She threw a pod into the machine and looked out the window while it brewed. There were tourists in the Marble Church tower. Little Playmobil-like people standing up above the dome, pointing out at the city, strangers sitting on her bench.
She took her coffee cup and sat down in the same armchair she had sat in the other day. She leaned her head back so it was resting against the backrest and sighed heavily.
How the hell had it all gone so wrong?
Her left eye had stopped throbbing. The skin around it now just felt stiff and leathery.
She took out her phone and looked at it. There were no unanswered calls or texts. Not a peep out of Martin since he had left her apartment, nor did she expect to hear from him, either.
Was Schäfer right? Should she report him for assault?
She was mad at him, but she was also mad at herself. She should have ended it a long time ago.
Heloise touched her eyebrow, where the gash was. The wound immediately started bleeding again. She swore under her breath and looked around the room for something to wipe the blood off with.
She stiffened.
For a long moment she didn’t breathe.
There on the wall—in the middle of the neatly arranged pattern of lithographs and art photography—hung a small, framed photograph of an old barn door.
She recognized the pattern in the wood.
Those two round windows … The metal bolt … The lines that sketched the outline of a creepy face.
It hadn’t been somewhere in the woods in Rørvig where she had seen it. It had been here, here in the waiting room. Lukas Bjerre had taken the picture in his father’s clinic.
Heloise jumped when the phone at the front desk started ringing. Heloise quickly looked over her shoulder as her pulse accelerated in her chest. Then she looked back at the picture again, questions screaming in her head.
What had she overlooked? What was she misinterpreting?
She thought about the soldier Gerda had told her about and the red light he had interpreted as a laser beam from a sniper’s rifle.
He sees something he recognizes and follows through, based on his automatic reflex. The problem is just that when you do that, two plus two doesn’t always equal four.
The soldier had seen a pattern he recognized and interpreted it incorrectly, Heloise thought. There hadn’t been any laser aimed at him. It had been an assumption, a wrong assumption.
Two plus two does not always equal four.
A thought began to form.
Jens had dropped his son off at school Monday morning. She knew that, but …
What was it exactly that Gerda had said? Who had she seen on the schoolyard?
Heloise’s eyes widened and adrenaline surged through her body.
She stood up and walked back out to the coatroom. She pulled her leather jacket down from its hanger, causing the empty clothes hangers to clang against each other, and hurried out into the stairwell.
She ran down the stairs, taking them three at a time, and as soon as she was out of the building she dialed Gerda’s number on her cell phone.
“Hi, Heloise!” Gerda said. Her voice sounded happy.
“Gerda, listen up. This is important.” Heloise spoke quickly. Her voice was serious and she could sense that she had Gerda’s full attention now.
“What’s wrong?”
“That morning in the schoolyard.” Heloise glanced quickly over her shoulder as she walked down Amaliegade. “Last Monday. Are you positive that you saw Lukas being dropped off at school?”
“Yes,” Gerda said. “Why, what’s wrong?”
“What exactly did you see?”
“I … I said hello to Jens in the schoolyard after I said goodbye to Lulu, and …”
“Yeah, I know. You said that. But did you see Lukas?”
Gerda was quiet for a long moment.
“Did you see Lukas?” Heloise repeated. “Or did you just see his father in the schoolyard and assume that Lukas had been dropped off?”
Gerda hesitated.
“Well, I saw Jens wave to Lukas,” she said. “I came out into the schoolyard and was on my way to the crosswalk … and then I saw Jens wave to Lukas as he walked into the school.”
“Did you see the boy or not?”
“Well, now I’m not sure, Heloise. Jens did wave, though. Who else would he have been waving at? What are you saying?”
“It’s like your client, Gerda. He saw a red light in the dark and assumed it was a gun being aimed at him. You saw Jens wave in the schoolyard and assumed that he had dropped off his son.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“It’s him,” Heloise said. “I think he murdered his own son.”