‘OK,’ Munch said, having taken up his usual spot in front of the overhead screen.
Gabriel Mørk saw everyone’s face light up as Mia entered the incident room.
‘Moonbeam,’ Ludvig Grønlie called out, and got up to hug her.
Anette Goli also rose in order to shake Mia’s hand, while Kim Kolsø grinned and gave her a thumbs-up from his chair.
‘OK,’ Munch said again. ‘As you can see, Mia is back, and we are all really pleased about that. And if you’re wondering who to thank, then you’re looking at him. And just so you know it: this is the first and last time I suck up to Mikkelson but, in my opinion, it was worth it.’
Munch allowed himself a small smile as he turned on the projector.
‘Where is Curry?’ he suddenly said. ‘Kim? Ludvig?’
Munch looked around the room but was met only with shaking heads.
‘Haven’t heard anything,’ Kim said.
‘OK,’ Munch said, clicking a button.
A picture appeared on the screen. The dead girl, but alive now, smiling faintly at the camera in something that could be a school photo.
‘Last night we had it confirmed that the girl we found in Hurum is seventeen-year-old Camilla Green. Born in 1995. Grew up in care. Her mother died when she was little, in a car crash. Her father is French, his name is—’
‘Laurent Clementz,’ Ludvig Grønlie interjected.
‘Yes, thank you, Ludvig.’
‘So far we haven’t managed to contact him,’ Munch continued, ‘and, according to Helene Eriksen, Camilla Green had very little contact with him. She used to visit him in France during the summer holidays when she was younger, but she was looked after by social services in Norway.’
‘Sorry, who is Helene?’ asked Gabriel.
‘Yes, of course. It has been a long night, and I’m sorry that not everyone has been updated about recent developments.’
He cleared his throat and drank some of the Farris mineral water on the table in front of him.
‘Helene Eriksen …’
Munch looked across to Grønlie.
‘We don’t have a picture of her, do we?’
Ludvig Grønlie shook his head.
‘OK, Camilla Green grew up in foster care with several different families, but she never seemed to settle with any of them.’
Munch quickly flicked through his notes. ‘I think we have a list of four addresses here, all of which she ran away from, before she came to Hurumlandet Nurseries at the age of fifteen.’
Munch seemed to expect questions, and he held up his hand towards the team.
He strangled a yawn; he did not look as if he had had much sleep.
‘Helene Eriksen,’ Ylva prompted him.
Gabriel could see Ylva watching Mia Krüger furtively, and he recognized the feeling. He, too, had experienced it when he started working here. The sense of awe at being in the same room as Mia Krüger, not wanting to say or do the wrong thing.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Munch went on. ‘Yesterday, we met with Helene, the manager of Hurumlandet Nurseries, the woman who reported Camilla Green missing three months ago. Ludvig and I accompanied her to the Institute of Forensic Medicine, and she confirmed that the girl we found is Camilla.’
At this point, Munch stopped and looked across to Grønlie again. ‘How was she on the way back?’
Ludvig sighed and shook his head. ‘Not good. She was in shock.’
‘And someone met her at the nurseries, someone who could look after her?’
Ludvig nodded again. ‘A guy called Paulus. Her assistant.’
‘Good,’ Munch said, flicking through his notes again.
Silence descended now, and Munch clicked the button again. This time, a photograph from the crime scene appeared, one they had seen earlier, Camilla lying on the heather, naked, in the strange pose, with the white flower in her mouth.
‘This Paulus …?’ Munch went on, glancing in the direction of Grønlie again.
‘No, we don’t have a picture yet.’
‘OK, anyway, Paulus appears to have been a former resident at Hurumlandet Nurseries, and now, as far as we can gather, he seems to be Helene’s right-hand man; it was he who sent us lists of residents, employees, teachers and everyone else with a link to the place. Ludvig, over to you?’
‘OK,’ Ludvig said, checking the papers on the table in front of him. ‘Hurumlandet Nurseries is a place for troubled teenagers. It was set up by Helene Eriksen in the autumn of 1999, and is privately owned but receives government support. The centre also works with mental-health services and the eating-disorder clinics at Ullevål and Dikemark hospitals. I’ve made a few calls, and no one has anything but good things to say about the place. It would appear that children and young people who have failed to settle elsewhere really benefit from a stay at Hurumlandet Nurseries. Some have lived there for several years.’
He leafed through his papers again.
‘Yes, as you know, it’s early days yet, but everyone I’ve spoken to praises the place, and Helene Eriksen in particular. She seems to have become a substitute mother for these young people. I’ll carry on digging, but so far I haven’t come across any red flags.’
‘Great, Ludvig, thank you. Uh …’
‘My turn?’ Kim Kolsø said with a wry smile.
‘Yes, great, Kim.’ Munch nodded.
‘We’ve had officers at the crime scene ever since we found her,’ Kim said. ‘Knocked on doors, gone through the area with a fine-toothed comb, but, as far as forensic evidence goes, we have found little. The area is popular with hikers, so we can forget about footprints, unless we test the shoes of half the locals. The lack of much else is something I personally find a little odd, but we’re still on it. We’ve requested back-up from Svelvik, Røyken and Sande, and we’ll keep looking until we find something, because there has to be something useful out there. We’re talking about a huge area, so it will take some time, but we’ve started and we won’t stop until we’re done. Of course, we do have some forensic evidence, but you’ve already seen it. The feathers, the candles, the flower in her mouth – a lily, I believe. And then we have a witness.’
He swiped his iPad.
‘A woman called Olga Lund, a pensioner, who lives on the road that leads to the path near where we found the victim, thought she saw a white van with a sticker on the side driving past, as she put it, just after the early-evening news, and coming back the same way, again as she put it, just before the eleven o’clock bulletin.’
The team smiled at this. They could easily imagine the old lady, her sense of time measured by her TV schedule.
‘A sticker?’ Mia said. It was the first time she had opened her mouth.
‘Yes, that’s what she said.’
‘A logo?’
‘I think that must have been what she meant.’
‘Nothing about what kind of logo?’
Kim scrolled down his iPad again. ‘There’s nothing written down here. I got the report from another officer, but I thought that I would drive up and talk to her myself.’
‘Great, Kim, thank you. Gabriel?’
Gabriel Mørk had been lost in a world of his own and was startled when he heard his name spoken.
‘Yes?’
‘Telephone records?’
‘They’ve been requested, and are on their way.’ Gabriel nodded.
‘Good.’
Gabriel looked across to Mia Krüger, who winked at him.
‘OK,’ Munch said. ‘Mia?’
Mia rose and stepped up in front of the screen. Munch gave her the remote control and sat down on a chair beside the lectern. Mia swept her long, dark hair behind her ear before clearing her throat and clicking to bring up the first picture.
‘I haven’t had much time to study them, I only got these yesterday.’ She smiled, a tad apologetically.
‘But there are several things which I believe are vital for us.’
Everyone in the room was silent now as Mia turned to face the screen.
‘There can be no doubt that this was planned, and that it had been planned for a long time. The first thing that struck me was that the crime scene is very contrived. Wouldn’t you agree?’
Mia clicked through a few pictures without waiting for the team to reply.
‘The wig. The feathers. The candles placed around her. The fact that she’s naked. The way her arms have been arranged. The flower in her mouth. A ritual. The first thing to cross my mind was an offering. A sacrifice.’
Mia took a step towards the screen and pointed out various sections of the picture.
‘The way the candles are arranged. This five-sided shape. The pentagram. It prompts immediate speculation, because it’s a well-known symbol, the gateway to, well, darkness, the devil. I’m not drawing any definitive conclusions now, but I’ve no doubt that we’re dealing with a person, or group of people, who are into that. The occult. Satanism.’
Mia looked across the room now to see if there were any questions, but everyone continued to sit completely still.
‘Do you understand what I mean?’
Some nodded faintly, but no one spoke up yet.
‘As I’m aware, there were no signs of sexual assault, is that right?’
Mia looked across to Munch, who nodded.
‘OK,’ Mia said, clicking through a sequence of new pictures.
‘The virgin,’ Mia continued, stopping at a close-up of the victim. ‘That’s what all these rituals are about, isn’t it?’
Still no one said anything.
‘I’m not saying that Camilla Green was a virgin, not many seventeen-year-old girls are these days, but the fact that she wasn’t sexually assaulted, the fact that she was placed here, among these symbols, naked, and pure, if you will, that’s important.’
Mia reached out for Munch’s mineral-water bottle and took a swig, lost in her own thoughts.
‘Mia?’ Munch coughed softly.
‘What?’
Mia looked at him.
‘Yes. Sorry.’ She pressed the button again and another picture appeared.
‘Like I said,’ Mia went on, ‘I haven’t had much time to look at these photos, so this is just surface.’
Mia raised her head again and smiled cautiously across the room. There was the odd nod here and there. Gabriel Mørk knew that, like him, everyone felt that familiar tingle of expectation. Mia would lead them through this. To the killer.
‘So someone posed her. Naked. Exposed her. A seventeen-year-old girl. Camilla Green. And so my next thought …’
She paused, but not so long that Munch had to rouse her.
‘Is it so that we would find her? Or to display her somehow? That’s an important question.’ Mia looked across to Munch.
‘Absolutely.’ He coughed.
‘Then we have the – let’s call it, the more physical evidence,’ Mia continued.
She clicked a few more times, until she found the picture they had started with.
‘Camilla Green was a healthy, normal girl. She had her problems, that’s true, a foster child, living in a kind of home …?’
‘Hurumlandet Nurseries,’ Munch interjected.
‘But look …’
Fresh pictures.
‘When she went missing, Camilla’s weight was normal. But when she was found, she looked like this.’
Gabriel almost could not bear to look.
‘Thin. Starved. With bruises and cuts to her knees.’
Mia kept clicking. ‘Her elbows …’ And on. ‘… to her calloused palms. She disappeared three months ago. A healthy teenager. Then she reappears like this. She was kept prisoner.’
Gabriel lowered his gaze now; he could not bear to look at the picture on the screen. A prisoner? He could feel he was not the only team member who struggled to process this development.
‘Any questions?’ Mia continued.
It took a while before anyone spoke.
‘I’ve been wondering about … the animal feed?’ Ylva ventured cautiously.
‘Precisely,’ Mia said. ‘An animal.’
‘What do you mean?’
She glanced across the room. ‘An animal, don’t you think, Kim?’
‘I don’t know what to think, Mia.’ Kim spoke in a low voice.
‘She was treated as if she were an animal,’ Mia explained, taking another gulp from the bottle on the table in front of her.
‘But why …?’
It was the new girl again, Ylva, still ashen.
‘That, I don’t know.’ Mia shrugged. ‘Like I said, I only got these pictures yesterday. These are just initial thoughts.’
Mia looked to Munch, who indicated that she could sit down again.
‘OK, great,’ he said as Mia went back to her chair.
There was a long silence in the room.
The others had seen Mia in action before and knew what she could do, but Ylva still looked baffled by what had just happened.
Munch rose and stepped up in front of the screen again. ‘OK, yes, good.’ Their boss scratched his beard. ‘Time for a cigarette, don’t you think?’ he said, and clapped his hands. ‘A quick fag, that’s all, before we carry on. It’s looking promising.’
No one in the room said anything, but Gabriel could see a smile form at the corner of Kim Kolsø’s mouth: Munch was the only member of the team who smoked, so these breaks were purely for his benefit.
Munch put on his coat and disappeared out on to the balcony while everyone else stayed behind.
‘Promising?’ Kim Kolsø was puzzled. ‘What has got into him today?’
Mia shrugged again.
‘It …’ Ludvig Grønlie began, but shut his mouth as quickly as he had opened it.
‘What, Ludvig?’ Kim asked, but Grønlie seemed reluctant to answer.
‘Perhaps Munch should tell us himself,’ Ludvig muttered.
‘What?’ Mia asked, now curious.
Ludvig hesitated, then he pulled out a piece of paper from the file in front of him and shoved it across to her.
‘We got the lists an hour ago.’
‘What lists?’
‘Of the residents and employees at Hurumlandet Nurseries.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Mia mumbled, her eyes scanning the paper in front of her.
‘Why, what’s wrong?’ Kim Kolsø said.
‘Rolf Lycke,’ Mia mumbled.
‘Who on earth is Rolf Lycke?’ Kim said, taking the paper from her.
‘Marianne’s boyfriend.’
‘Marianne who?’
‘Marianne Munch,’ Ludvig said quietly.
‘His ex-wife?’ Kim sounded surprised.
‘Yep.’ Ludvig Grønlie nodded. ‘Marianne Munch’s boyfriend. Rolf Lycke. He teaches out there.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Kim said.
‘Exactly,’ Grønlie muttered, slipping the list back into the file as Munch returned from the balcony.