The first person Louise called was Winnie Moesgaard in Karlslunde. She waited an unusually long time before the woman answered. The elegant elderly lady’s thin, feeble voice nearly broke.
“My husband passed away this weekend,” she said. “The undertaker just stopped by.”
“You have my deepest condolences,” Louise said. “I’m so very sorry to bother you at such a sad time, but unfortunately it’s very important.”
“What’s it about?” Louise could barely hear her.
“Last week,” Louise began, searching for the right words, “I met Margit Østergaard, the woman who sat with your husband.”
“Yes.” She sounded hesitant.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you, but this morning she was found murdered. I’m well aware that you have a lot on your mind right now.”
The woman gasped.
“She was shot in her home sometime between midnight and seven a.m., so I would be very appreciative if I could ask a few questions, if you can handle it.”
Silence. For a moment she was afraid that Mrs. Moesgaard had hung up. Finally Louise said, “Would you prefer that I come out to you, so we can sit down and talk about it?”
“Heavens no! I just can’t understand how this could happen. It makes me so terribly sad. Margit was such a fine and warm person.”
“Unfortunately we don’t know much, and that’s partly what I’d like to talk to you about.” Louise decided it wasn’t a good time to ask if her husband had received help in dying. It was best to stick with what was most important right now.
“When you and your husband used the home hospice nurse service, did you meet any other nurses besides Margit?”
It sounded as if Mrs. Moesgaard blew her nose and cleared her throat while covering her phone. Finally she said, “I very much liked Margit. So after the first time she was here, I asked the service to send her regularly. That’s one of the things the nurse service offers. Once in a while another nurse spelled her, of course. They all have jobs and families.”
“So there have been others?”
“Yes, once another nurse took the night watch. But I didn’t speak much with her.”
“Do you remember her name?” Louise was ready to write the name down.
“Hmmm. Just a moment.”
Louise heard her footsteps, and in a moment she was back on the phone. “It was Esther, but I didn’t write her last name down.”
“Do you know anything about her? Where she lived, where she worked when she wasn’t a home hospice nurse?”
“No, I don’t know anything about her, but she was also very nice. We didn’t speak very much, I didn’t learn much about her as I did with Margit. It meant so much to me when we sat with my husband, talking about this and that. It took my mind off things.”
“Of course.” Louise felt sorry for the charming lady. She was all alone now.
“But can’t the nurse service provide you with her name? Surely they know it.”
“Yes, they must. Do you have a number we can call?”
“I have it somewhere here…”
A few moments later, she was back. Slowly she read a telephone number.
“Thank you so much for all your help.” Louise felt she’d made a bit of progress when she realized it was a landline number, not the one to the emergency hotline.
* * *
Toft had also just finished talking to someone, and he reported that Helle Frederiksen’s sister didn’t know of any home hospice nurse service, but she knew her sister took evening and night shifts once in a while.
“The sister didn’t think any extra money was coming in, but she didn’t want to ask Frederiksen if she was doing something else those evenings.”
Louise called the landline number Winnie Moesgaard had given her. No one answered. She looked the number up on her computer and was informed that it was an unlisted number. She called down to the tech boys and asked them to run it through the system.
“Bingo!” Jørgensen said, as soon as he hung his phone up. “The carpenter’s daughter says her father had been sitting with terminally ill people once a week since her mother’s death. The daughter thought it was creepy, and she asked him if he could volunteer to visit the elderly. But apparently it was important to her father to sit with the dying.”
He had their attention now. “But she didn’t know anything about it, she moved away from home a year ago, and in fact it sounded like she didn’t care if he sat with dying people or went to soccer matches. She was just happy he stayed active and was around people after her mother died.”
Louise felt her scalp tingling. “Jesus! They are being taken out one by one.”
“But how many are there?” Toft asked.
“I have no idea,” she said. “But we have to find out, fast.”
Suhr had walked in and was leaning against the door frame, listening without saying a word.
“We have to focus one hundred percent on identifying the others,” Toft said, looking at Louise.
She nodded. “I’ll talk to the people I’ve already contacted, to get names and hopefully addresses. You two get on the list of the other relatives of donors to the Swiss account. Let’s not mention that we suspect someone helped the deceased person in their families to die, they might not even know what went on. And we can’t risk them clamming up on us.”
The phone in front of her rang. It was Nis, the tech who had traced the unlisted number. “Margit Østergaard,” he said. Before he could give her the address, she cut him off.
“Thanks, I was out there this morning, I know the address. Damn it!”
Jørgensen looked at her in anticipation. “It was Margit’s private number that Mrs. Moesgaard wrote down,” she said. They were back at square one.
Before she could say more, Toft stood up. “I’m going out there to search the house. If there’s any lists of names or anything else with names on it, I’ll find it. She had to have been in contact with some of the others.”
Louise smiled at him. Typical Toft. He was thorough as he could be, and stubborn; you could rely on him to do the grunt work.
On the other side of the desk, Jørgensen was already calling the next on the list. Louise listened to him explain and ask for the names of the home hospice nurses who had sat with the dying relative.
Louise thought about Eik for a moment. Imagined him going to England to find the daughter he’d never met. Now the daughter was missing, and he was in jail. Somebody should tell him that the man who shot Sofie was back in Denmark. She couldn’t be sure, but she felt certain that Eik had gone to England to find Steph, that he was afraid the perpetrator might be after her.
She texted Rønholt and asked him to tell Eik about the homicide in Hvidovre, if he got permission to talk to him.
“Niels,” Jørgensen said, after he had hung up. “The son didn’t remember the last name, but he’d thought it was a bit inappropriate for a man to sit with his mother while she was dying. But his mother brushed him off, told him she felt safe with Niels at her side.”
“Surely there’s more than the few we have now?” Louise said.
Her former partner shrugged. “Honest, I thought the home hospice nurse service was a thing of the past. And I have no idea how many of them there might be. How do people even find out about it?”
“There has to be a doctor involved! They get the medicine somewhere. Like, if it’s morphine, that’s not something most people can get their hands on. And how do they make sure they can prove it’s an assisted suicide, not murder, if they get caught?”
She thought again about Else Corneliussen, who had helped Sofie’s mother to die. She’d asked Olle to find her, but as yet he’d made no headway.
“If it’s true that they help people die, like you’re saying,” Jørgensen said, “at the very least they risk being charged with euthanasia. I just don’t understand how they dare do this. Dying people have to make it crystal clear they want to die, otherwise it’s murder.”
Louise thought about Melvin. If he had ended up as a vegetable, or as someone who just laid there looking at life without being a part of it, could she have convinced herself to help him? “Probably they do it because they think it’s wrong that people suffering from a fatal illness, people in great pain, have to leave the country and pay a fortune for an assisted suicide. And also it’s about the right to die with dignity. I’m certain they’ve all experienced something that made them willing to run the risk, just like Sofie Parker.”
Jørgensen nodded, apparently agreeing with her. He called the next person on the list. After talking to them for a few moments, he said, “Is there anyone else in the family who might remember the name?”
After hanging up, he said, “Looks like it wasn’t a topic of conversation. This woman explained that her aunt had wanted a home hospice nurse, so the rest of the family stayed away.”
“Damn it!” Louise was afraid the perpetrator was way ahead of them. “We have to talk to people in person, not just call them up. I’ll get Olle to help us. Otherwise it’ll take too long to go through the list.”
She called him and filled him in on why she needed his help. “Can you go back to the nursing home and talk to Kurt Melvang?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Sure. I’ve still got everything right in front of me on the desk here. It’s the senile old guy who dropped his pants, right?”
“That’s him. And if he doesn’t remember the name of the nurse, ask his two adult children. They were pissed off at the nurse service for robbing them of their inheritance. I’ll try to set up a meeting with him in Birkerød.”
“You doing okay?” Olle asked, as Louise was about to hang up.
His sudden concern made her pause, and she sank in her chair. “I don’t know. I think so.”