Farewell to Freedom (34 page)

Suhr stepped all the way into the office while Toft remained in the doorway, leaning against the frame.

“We would really like your assistance for the rest of the day,” Suhr said. When he saw Louise's expression, he added that Willumsen had suggested it himself, that they put everything they could into confirming or disproving whether the Serb had been seen in or around Skelbækgade and Sønder Boulevard around the times of the two murders.

“We're going to make the rounds on Istedgade and the rest of the neighborhood with this picture,” he continued. “If it turns out that there aren't any witnesses who saw him moving around in the area, then we'll drag the two Albanians in and charge them with the killings and hope that that's enough to make them talk.”

“We have had them in here for questioning for the last two days,” Toft added as if to justify this harsh-sounding decision. “They're not saying anything. Nothing at all. Except that they keep claiming it wasn't them. They also clam up completely when we ask them to tell us what they know about Bosko. They just shake their heads and repeat that we should find out where he was when the two murders took place.”

“So that's what we're going to spend the rest of the day on,” Suhr concluded. Then he corrected himself. “Of course, we'll also find out if anyone saw him between the two killings.”

Louise was still happy it was spring, but some of the effervescence was gone, replaced by an expectant restlessness. It suited her just fine to go back to Istedgade, even though she was kind of hoping they didn't find him. Hard to tell what the consequences would be if an international criminal with a background like that set up shop in Copenhagen. She also knew that the reason she was looking forward to taking a little break from her own case so much was the way her conversation with Henrik Holm had ended the day before.

“We'll split the area up between you,” Suhr said and added that Mikkelsen was providing four people from the downtown precinct. “Willumsen will go with you, so there'll be five of us from here,” Suhr continued, dropping the pictures on the table.

Louise pushed one over to Lars and took the other one herself.

She didn't know what she'd imagined a man with so many human lives on his conscience would look like, but she was sure she'd seen him before, and she knew where, too.

47

C
AMILLA HAD BROUGHT HER COMFORTER IN TO USE ON THE SOFA
, where she turned on the morning shows as soon as Markus left for school. She hadn't slept well at all. She shouldn't have told the police about Jonas's toe. The thoughts kept swirling around in her head, but she'd seen the pastor's reaction when she mentioned that she thought there might be a connection. It had been there, but then it was gone again. At 3
A
.
M
. she'd gotten up and shaken six sleep-inducing valerian pills out into her hand, but that hadn't helped. The last time she looked at the clock, it was a little past 5:00. By that point, there was just under two hours until she had to get up to see Markus off. Now she ought to do some laundry. Markus had to wear a pair of sweats and a long-sleeved T-shirt whose arms were too short when she was forced to confirm that there was nothing else clean.

But instead of getting up and gathering the laundry, she took her thoughts back to that evening, when she'd been sitting in the pastor's kitchen. Suddenly, a new thought struck her. What if the stillborn baby in the church wasn't related to the pastor, but to the son's mother, Henrik's late wife Alice? Then maybe that would explain why Henrik so categorically rejected that the two things had anything to do with each other.

That was a possibility that hadn't occurred to her before now, surely because she'd never known the boy's mother. She'd only seen one picture of her, a photo of the three of them on the bookshelf at a dilapidated farm in Sweden where Markus had spent last Easter with Jonas and Henrik. Once in Laholm, Camilla had almost not been able to figure out the last bit of the way to the farm when it was time to go pick him up. Alice Holm smiled from the photograph, and she guessed it had been taken when Jonas was about three—one year before Alice died, eight years ago now.

Camilla tried to remember what Henrik had said about his wife and their time in Bosnia. She didn't know where they'd been stationed as aid workers, just that the camp had been in a small town that had been subjected to several brutal massacres in short succession.

Camilla tossed the comforter aside and went into the bedroom to get her laptop. It didn't take her long to figure out that it pretty much could only be Srebrenica, where the bodies from the brutal “ethnic cleansings” had been carted off to a huge mass grave outside of town.

She also searched Infomedia to see if the pastor had written anything about his experiences in the Balkans. She determined that he had: there were six articles. Camilla felt a little flutter in her stomach where she hadn't been feeling much of anything lately, but there turned out to be nothing to go on. They were all objective descriptions of the area, of the mood that weighed on the city like an overcast sky. He wrote that no one ever produced a concrete number of how many people had died in the brutal ethnic cleansing, but that it had affected all portions of the civilian population: men, women, children, the elderly. No one escaped. Maybe five, or eight, or ten thousand dead. Who knows? The point was that the correct number didn't mean that much to the residents who were left anyway. “The people are broken and humiliated. There couldn't be more sorrow, even if the tally went up.”

He wrote well, Camilla observed, after she'd read all the way through. Gripping and clear. Even though the events were from fourteen years before, they got under her skin and gave her the sense of being a snotty-nosed, privileged dolt like the rest of the Danish population. No one here had experienced anything that came anywhere close to what the Muslims in the Balkans had suffered; and despite that, a large number of Danes still felt an inflated sense of arrogance toward the people who had been affected and had since come to Denmark to make a fresh start.

She suddenly sat up, alert, concentrating as if she were listening to something. She didn't move, trying to be sure, but then she realized she had no doubt that it had been there. Her cheeks pulled up and for a second she smiled, a smile no one saw, as to her great relief she noted that everything in her wasn't dead after all.

She felt indignation, rage at how ridiculously smug and egocentric people were. She was struck by it, and it made her want to write. Maybe it was a little late to be scolding people for the cold shoulder that had greeted so many asylum-seekers from the former Yugoslavia, but she yearned to do it. The last couple of weeks, she'd totally written off ever feeling this again. Apparently she just needed to be prodded hard enough.

Camilla got up and went in to print out the six articles. Then she read them again, but aside from eliciting her compassion, there was nothing in what Henrik had written that seemed in any way related to his private life.

She did manage to figure out that they'd been sent by the Red Cross, and that one of the people they'd shared their barracks with was Elsa Lynge. Camilla had run across her in connection with one of the big emergency aid collection drives, so she knew Elsa was still somehow affiliated with the organization.

After a quick shower reinvigorated her, she sat down on the sofa and called the Danish Red Cross. She only had to talk to two people before she had Elsa Lynge on the line.

“I'm calling you about a personal matter,” Camilla admitted right off the bat, and asked if she should call back at another time.

“No, no, now's as good as any,” Elsa responded. “But could I ask you to call me back on my cell in three minutes? Then I can just duck out and have a smoke.”

Camilla smiled and jotted down Elsa's cell number on the back of one of the pages she'd just printed out.

“Henrik and Alice Holm,” Elsa repeated once Camilla had her back on the line. “Yeah, I know him, although now of course it's mostly from the media, but I don't think I remember her.”

Camilla sank back in the sofa a little.

“Can you think of anyone else I could try calling? Someone that you think might remember her?”

“I'm going to need longer than a smoke break to think about that one,” Elsa admitted after a moment's contemplation, during which Camilla could hear her puffing away heartily on her cigarette.

“It was so long ago, and I've done so much traveling, but if you tell me what you need to know, then maybe that would make it a little easier for me to think of who you should talk to.”

Very briefly and without going into too many details, Camilla explained that she had been the one who found the stillborn infant in Henrik Holm's church, and that she had reason to believe that there might be some connection between the baby in the church and the baby the Holms had while they were living in the refugee camp.

Camilla heard Elsa's lighter clicking and a hoarse cough as Elsa lit the next cigarette.

“I can tell you one thing for sure,” Elsa said once she finished coughing. “In the two and a half years I was there, none of the aid workers in our camp had a baby. The conditions just weren't suitable for babies,” Elsa said, clearing her throat when her voice became gravelly. “Of course there were tons of kids and babies who had survived with their mothers or who were left behind after the rest of the family had been wiped out.”

Again Elsa paused to take a drag off her cigarette.

Camilla thought for a moment before she asked her next question.

“And when exactly were you there?”

“From the middle of '96 until the end of '99,” Elsa said without stopping to think. “I had just come home when we celebrated the new millennium. But there was something about his wife getting sick, and as far as I can remember they left early.” Camilla could hear that Elsa had started walking.

“And you're sure we're talking about the same pastor?” Camilla asked, even though she knew the question was unnecessary.

“Yeah, there weren't any others,” Elsa confirmed. “And then there was his wife's death. A few years after that and so tragic, to die at such a young age, but I don't know where you got the idea that they had a child while they were there.”

Camilla sat holding her phone in her hand long after the call was over. Maybe she wasn't finding her way back to her old self after all. On the contrary, maybe she was really losing it.

48

A
T
HQ, S
UHR HAD SUMMONED
W
lLLUMSEN
'
S INVESTIGATIVE TEAM
to his office. Mikkelsen was just pulling the blinds to keep the sharp May sun out of their eyes, but he was listening attentively as Louise told them where she'd run into Bosko.

“He was coming out of the building on Valdemarsgade, the one that MiloÅ¡ Vituk's apartment is in,” Louise said, and was able to tell them that without a doubt it had happened on the Wednesday after Kaj Antonsen was murdered because she'd looked up her report from the stakeout and she had it lying on the table in front of her.

She explained that the Serb had come out the front door while she was standing in the doorway across the street.

“There was something about his eyes and the way he looked at me that gave me the sense that maybe we knew each other. But we didn't, and now I'm sure he was just being vigilant. He noticed that I saw him.”

“Is this something you're totally sure of, or is there a chance you're confusing him with someone else?” Willumsen asked her, looking tense.

Louise smiled at him stiffly and noted how a few hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Because she was completely sure that the man in the picture and the man she'd seen on Valdemarsgade were identical.

She just said, “I'm sure,” and was struck by the tense silence that had come over the room. She looked at her partner and saw the anxiety in his eyes, the worry that made their blue a shade darker.

“We made eye contact twice,” she said. “Both when he left the property, and when he returned again a little later.”

Suhr was sitting behind his desk with his hands folded, his thumbs circling each other, and Toft had taken out his plastic cigarette while his partner, Stig, was tipping his chair back perilously.

Louise caught Stig's eye, and the chair's front legs hit the floor when he tipped back down, as she asked him to help her explain what Igli had told them about Bosko.

They listened in silence, but Louise noticed with growing concern the looks that Suhr and Willumsen were exchanging as she and Stig talked, because it hit her that right now they were each trying to decide, on their own, whether Bosko was of such a caliber that they were about to hand the case over to the PET, the Security and Intelligence Service, Denmark's equivalent of the CIA. She noted how Willumsen moved to speak the instant they were done.

“We'll get a court order so we can start a wiretap on MiloÅ¡ Vituk as soon as possible,” he decided, not even looking at Suhr as he spoke.

Something inside Louise fell into place. Of course he didn't want to hand over a case that might be of international importance, and she respected him for that.

“Bring those two Albanians in for questioning again,” Suhr decided, and he glanced at Mikkelsen. “This time, don't let them leave until they've told us exactly what the fuck they know about Bosko. How did they find out what happened in Prague? Who saw Bosko? And where was he seen?”

Suhr slapped his desk with the palm of his hand, making a loud bang, and looked at them.

“What about the pregnant women?” Lars asked.

Willumsen looked at him, as if he'd just farted.

“To hell with the pregnant women right now. The baby was dead, so it's not like that case is going anywhere.”