As soon as they left the Nailsea Police Station in one of the screaming yellow-and-white patrol cars, they were in the countryside. The hilly terrain, dotted with trees and lined with stone walls between fields, stretched out on both sides of the road. Houses appeared at intervals until they reached the Parker family address, located in a cluster of homes.
All the anxiety and worry that had welled up inside Louise during the past twenty-four hours was turning into anger. She couldn’t understand how Eik could just take off for England without telling her. If for no other reason than because she was his boss, and he had disappeared in the middle of the workday. But, of course, it was mostly a personal blow. On the other hand, she knew he must have been overwhelmed by shock when he got the call from the English police.
Davies slowed at a pub on the right side of the road. He turned down a narrow driveway leading to three short streets that formed an E. He parked at the last one and shut off the engine.
Louise sat for a moment studying the nearly identical, gray brick houses, two stories, with front lawns and gates out to the streets. Several big cars were parked beside the houses. Everything looked neat and well-kept except for one lawn filled with junk. She could see it wasn’t a neighborhood meant for lower incomes. She stepped out of the car.
The Parkers’ house was surrounded by tall bushes and trees; the garden was hidden, but the house itself stood on a slight rise. It had an open view of the field behind. A sheet of plywood covered a window facing the street. Davies held the gate open for Louise. Police barrier tape blocked the front door, and a sign forbade anyone to enter. The garden was cordoned off along the sidewalk and farther on to the opposite side, but there were no police officers in sight. Davies lifted the key out of his pocket, but before unlocking the door, he rang the doorbell and waited.
“The cleaners will arrive later today, but we’re allowing the husband and daughter to move back in. Our crew of technicians finished up this morning. But I don’t know if the two of them want to move back. Right now they’re staying with his mother in Bath.”
Louise nodded. She eyed him for a moment. There was something very civil about the way he and Sheila Jones were treating her. If an Englishman had barged in and tried to contaminate one of her crime scenes, she also would have arrested him immediately, but she wasn’t sure if she would have been so accommodating and cooperative before she had finished checking the man’s explanation. Apparently they trusted her, and that impressed her.
“Hello,” Davies shouted when he opened the door. As expected, no one answered. He had picked up a newspaper and the day’s mail from outside the door. The kitchen/dining room was to the right. The blood had been washed from the room, but the markings around the bloodstains remained for the cleaners to take care of. They stepped inside. It was well lit, with upper cabinets along the entire wall just inside the door. A glass cabinet containing porcelain and wineglasses hung on the opposite wall. The stove stood along the wall bordering the entryway. Davies pointed. “She was standing at the sink when she was shot.”
Jones was right, Louise thought. When you’re in your kitchen fixing dinner, you’re not on alert. You are completely unprotected. You can’t see out and you don’t know who is looking in.
“I’m reasonably sure he was hiding in the bushes out there.” Davies pointed. “That’s where we found the footprints. And if he drove here, he could have parked where we did. But no one else living here noticed a strange car, so more likely he parked up behind Battleaxe, the pub we passed on the way. Their restaurant is popular, it’s filled almost every evening, and often cars are parked on the road out front. But there are no surveillance cameras, so we haven’t been able to track him that way.”
Place mats lay on the dining room table, along with a pack of unopened paper napkins. A short black leather jacket hung over one chair. A calendar had been put up on the refrigerator, along with a few shopping lists, and a row of cookbooks filled a shelf on the wall bordering the living room. A metallic odor and a faint hint of chlorine hung in the air.
“Is it possible to borrow a picture of her to show my colleague, so he can identify her?” Louise asked. She followed him into the living room. She noted a white velour sofa group, a flat-screen TV, and another dining table with high-backed chairs by the covered patio.
“Maybe up in her office,” Davies said, on the way to the stairway in the hall. “She kept the books for her husband’s business.”
Louise glanced around to gain some final impressions. Reproductions of Picassos and small, framed lithographs hung on the walls. The house was decorated in a light style, not particularly Scandinavian. Nor was it particularly English. It was more whitewashed, French, and romantic. A three-arm candlestick holder stood on a buffet, and potted plants stuck in outer pots had been placed on the windowsills. Everything was nice and impersonal, more like a false front. Though that is probably unfair, Louise thought. A home can look nice and tidy if the person taking care of it doesn’t have a full-time job.
She followed Davies up the stairs. There were four doors on the landing, and he opened the one leading into the office. A desk nearly filled one wall. Louise glanced inside a bedroom with a double bed covered by a patterned bedspread. A large wardrobe stood along a wall, opposite a low secretary pushed into the corner, over which hung a teak-framed mirror. Louise then checked the next room: a large bathroom with a bathtub.
The daughter’s room was at the end of the landing. Louise opened the door to what resembled a bomb crater. Apparently the daughter wasn’t so different from most teenagers. Clothes—black clothes dotted with studs, scarves, and thick-heeled Dr. Martens boots—lay scattered on the bed, the floor, and a dresser beside the desk. Posters of bands Louise had never heard of hung on the walls.
It reminded her of Jonas. She wondered if his room at boarding school was as chaotic as this one. Most likely. Unless they had rules against such things.
“I think we can use this,” Davies said from the office. Louise closed the door to the adolescent cave behind her.
He was holding a photograph of Sofie Parker smiling in a lawn chair, wearing a white summer top. Her hair was pinned up behind her head; her eyes looked directly at the camera.
“Summer, 2013, it says on the back,” he said. He waited.
Louise’s stomach sank; she felt a sudden and enormous aversion to the smiling woman. Sofie Parker was a few years older than Louise, but even though she looked carefree and happy in the photo, her expression revealed a seriousness seen in women who had grown up early. She was beautiful and at ease with herself, and it wasn’t difficult to see that she was a good match for Eik.
“Fine,” she said. She handed the photo back. “What else have you found in here?”
The office had obviously been searched. Everything was piled up, systematically checked, in a way a person working there never would arrange things.
Davies stood beside the door, pointing to a wastebasket beside the desk. “The brown wrapping paper from two packages sent from Mexico were found in there. They were postmarked Cozumel. We’re examining them now to trace the sender. Apparently the husband knows nothing about this, and it could be anything bought online.”
The front door below opened and a man’s voice called out. Davies yelled that they were upstairs, and he started down the steps. Louise stayed behind, studying the desk and the piles made by the English police. Photos of the daughter when she was a young child hung from the bulletin board. She couldn’t have been more than two years old in one of them, leaning against a stroller in front of a large lake with mountains in the background. Another photo showed her with a school backpack, smiling toothlessly at the camera.
She took the picture Davies had found. She had no desire whatsoever to be the one who showed it to Eik.
It was like stepping into a paused film when she entered the living room. The husband, a large man with short, blond hair, stood by the kitchen door holding his mail, absorbed in hushed conversation with Davies. His back was to his daughter, who stood by the dining room table with her phone. She looked furious. It was impossible not to sense the tension between father and daughter. Nothing was spoken; it simply filled the room.
Louise walked over to her. “Hello,” she said, introducing herself. “I’m from Copenhagen Police. What’s your name?”
“Steph.” The girl glanced up. Her black hair fell in her eyes. “It’s only him over there who still insists on calling me Stephanie. I hate that name.”
The girl was pale and dismissive. She wore heavy eyeliner and green fingernail polish, and a small sparkling stone in her nose.
Davies called Louise over. She shook the widower’s hand, then offered her condolences and explained that she worked in the Danish Search Department, which had investigated the disappearance of his wife.
“It’s news to me that my wife had been missing,” he said, as if he weren’t convinced it was true. “Of course, I knew she was Danish, but she seldom talked about her past. And I respected her wish to put it behind her.”
He looked like a man who hadn’t slept much lately. He turned the broad wedding ring on his left ring finger as he spoke.
“This just arrived in the mail,” Davies said. He handed Louise a letter from a Swiss bank.
Nigel Parker had tossed the rest of the mail on the kitchen table. A few advertisements, a local paper, a birthday invitation. “I don’t understand it. The account is in my wife’s name, but there must be some mistake. We have no dealings with a bank in Zurich.”
Steph stared at her phone again, as if she weren’t listening. Her father took out his reading glasses from his pocket. Confused, he glanced back and forth between Davies and Louise. “There’s almost eighty-eight thousand euros in the account.”
“The postings have been made over a long period of time; the account can’t be new,” Davies said. “May I take this with me?”
Suddenly Steph ran out of the room, and shortly after a door upstairs slammed.
Parker seemed to ignore his daughter’s behavior and nodded. “Of course.” His voice was thick. “But my wife never mentioned a foreign bank account.”
He explained that they had banked at Barclays in Bristol since moving to town. “We’ve always used the same bank.”
“We’ll look into it,” Davies replied.
Parker seemed confused, on the edge of tears. His hands shook as he folded his glasses and hung them in the V-neck of his sweater.
Davies pulled out a chair and guided him into it. Louise gestured that she was going upstairs to talk to the daughter.
“Swiss banks aren’t wild about giving access to their accounts,” Davies said, as Louise walked up the steps. “But, of course, we’ll set the wheels in motion at once.”
Louise knocked on the girl’s bedroom door before opening it. Steph lay on her bed, face buried in the mattress. “May I come in?”
“Mmmm.” Her voice was muffled, but she turned over and sat up.
“It must be difficult, with all these questions being asked.” Louise moved the clothes draped over the chair and sat down.
“I can bloody well understand if Mum were seeing someone else,” she said, angry now. “That idiot down there was never interested in her. He’s always at the store.”
The girl stared straight ahead, her expression filled with sorrow and pain. She kicked the boots lying on the bed and sat with her back against the wall.
After a moment, Louise asked, “Do you know what your mother ordered from Mexico?”
Steph shook her head without looking at Louise.
“Does she usually shop online?”
The girl shrugged. “It might be something for the store. Sometimes things get sent here instead. I don’t know, I don’t have anything to do with it. But Mum always checked the mail. She ran the office.”
Another pause. The girl’s eyes were blank, her face as closed as a fist.
Louise knew the girl might shut her out completely, but she decided to fish around. “Did your parents quarrel?”
Steph shook her head. “He and I are the only ones that quarrel. He doesn’t like me, and I don’t care because I don’t like him either.” Now she looked at Louise. “So you’re from Denmark. Like Mum.”
Louise nodded and smiled. “Have you been there?”
“No. But Mum had plans for us to visit. That’s not going to happen now.” She began to cry. She swiped angrily at her tears, leaving black streaks across her face.
“Did you ever go along when your mother went to London?”
The daughter’s expression turned defiant as she shook her head again. “She went there when she needed to get away from him. She always said she had to shop there because Nailsea was such a dump. And she had a hairdresser in London; she wanted her hair to look decent, she said. But she never bought anything for herself when she was there, only clothes for me and tea and Stilton cheese from Fortnum and Mason. She would much rather live in London, but he didn’t want to.”
Louise wanted so much to hug the young girl and take her back to Copenhagen with her.
She hadn’t heard Davies come up the stairs, but now he stood at the door. “I’m ready to leave.” He stepped inside the room. “I’ve spoken with your father, and we’ve agreed that you and I can talk when you come home from school tomorrow. It’s important that you think about this. You might have seen something anyway. It’s completely normal to not remember much at first, after such a shock, but details often come back after a few days.”
The girl turned to the window. Louise sensed that the questioning would be difficult; Davies didn’t realize he should have set things up with the girl, not her father. She weighed whether to get involved, but decided against it. She told Steph to call her if she ever wanted to come to Copenhagen. That she would like to show her around.
She laid her card on the desk and smiled at her one last time before following Davies down the stairs.