Call Me Princess (10 page)

Louise stood in the doorway of the first restaurant, somewhat at a loss as she tried to figure out who was in charge. But all the employees looked the same, so she decided it didn’t matter too much who she approached.

—

T
HE HEADWAITER GATHERED ALL HIS STAFF TOGETHER AND ASKED
the whole group who had worked the evening shift on Monday. Four people said they had, and they willingly came over to study the picture Louise was holding out. None of them recognized Susanne, but they assured Louise that that did not mean the woman in the picture hadn’t been there.

“We had three turns per table that night,” one of the waiters said, his brow thoughtfully furrowed.

Louise waited for a translation. She wasn’t sure what he meant by “turns.”

“Every time you seat a party at a table, serve them, and then clear the table, that’s a turn. On a night with weather like we had on Monday, each table gets turned about three times, on average. So if there’s nothing that really stands out about the customers, it’s almost impossible to keep them all straight.”

She nodded in understanding and thanked him before proceeding to the next restaurant, no longer feeling optimistic. Susanne was not the kind of person you would notice in a crowd, and she figured this Jesper Bjergholdt would have done as little as possible to attract attention to himself.

Louise stopped to look at the oversized flowerbed with its enormous blossoms, standing with majestic pride. She cast a quick glance at her watch and strolled over to a bench to sit for a second and enjoy the view. She closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun, feeling the warmth permeate her. Without a thought in her head, she let herself be carried away by the light.

When she figured she couldn’t afford to stay any longer, she opened her eyes and sat there, watching the patrons dining at Perlen with its big windowed façade. She was lost in thought and actually wasn’t all that surprised when she suddenly caught sight of Peter.

He was sitting at a table right by the window, and a blond girl was just sitting down across from him. Louise leaned forward a little on the bench. Based on the length of her hair, it could be Camilla. She decided to go in and say hi, but as she got closer, she realized that the girl sitting across from Peter was his sales rep, Lina. They must be sitting there waiting for a client. Louise quickly sat back down and hoped they hadn’t noticed her, because she had no desire or time to be introduced and then be forced to explain that she was working, looking for witnesses at the surrounding restaurants.

She then walked over toward Balkonen, which had a large outdoor patio on the ground floor, with just a stone balustrade separating it from Plaenen’s lawn and footpaths. Before she went in, she pulled the picture of Susanne out of her purse again and took a deep breath.

“Well, let me just find out who was here on Monday,” the waiter said willingly, once she’d explained why she was there.

She stood there, looking around. A young woman was balancing a tray full of beers, the tray the size of the bottom of an oil barrel. She held on tight as she wove her way through the restaurant over to a table where a group of young guys was seated, teasing each other about how many beers they could drink without throwing up when they rode the Demon afterward.

Louise thought back to one time she’d come to Tivoli with Camilla and a group of guys about the same age as these. Back then, one of the group had thrown up on the roller coaster, although thankfully it was not she. She didn’t have a chance to draw her memories fully out of the fog, because suddenly the waiter was beckoning her toward the very back of the restaurant.

“Olsen,” he said, pointing to a man with an enormous mustache, who was talking to somebody standing in the kitchen.

The waiter disappeared again, and Louise stood there waiting for Olsen to finish his conversation.

—

“I
TOTALLY DIDN’T THINK SHE’D BE BACK FOR IT HERSELF,” HE SAID AFTER
studying the picture for a second. Before Louise had a chance to react to his cryptic comment, he turned around and disappeared again toward the kitchen.

Irritated, she started to follow him, but stopped when he returned a moment later with a lavender cardigan in his hand.

“Here it is,” he said, holding the sweater out to her.

Louise started to explain she wasn’t here about a sweater. She was looking for the man who had been dining with the woman in the picture.

Olsen was still standing there with the sweater dangling, and it didn’t seem like he was interested in hearing any more about why she was there. She guessed that they must be serving the meals for the staff in the back, so he was eager to get rid of her as quickly as possible.

“So this woman in the picture was here?” Louise hurriedly said to keep his attention.

He nodded and hung the sweater over her arm. “We stuck it in the lost-and-found for her in the back, once we realized she’d left it.”

So far, Louise was following him. She found it a little odd that Susanne hadn’t mentioned that she’d forgotten her cardigan. “Can you remember who she was here with?”

“Nope.” Olsen glanced over at the staircase that led up to the balcony on the upper floor. “But I can show you where they sat.”

Louise followed him, hoping it might jog his memory if he showed her where they’d eaten.

“They sat over there in the corner.” He made a gesture with his head. “She was with her boyfriend, I assume,” he said, sounding like he was striving to tell the police officer what she wanted to hear. He wasn’t particularly convincing, and Louise got the sense that he was guessing instead of telling her something that was actually stored in his memory.

“What makes you think they were boyfriend and girlfriend?” Louise asked, studying him closely to observe any reactions that might be evident in his face. “What did he look like? Were they holding hands, or was it something one of them said?”

Her questions were curt and terse, meant to emphasize that he should keep his guesswork to himself and share only concrete information he was sure of.

“Obviously I’m not sure....” he said after thinking about it for a moment.

“So, on Monday night you served the woman in the picture and the man she was with?” Louise fished slowly.

Olsen was starting to get irritated now, too. “You couldn’t really say that. It wasn’t my table. I had that group of tables over there.” He pointed over toward the opposite side of the room. “But I noticed them, because she forgot her sweater. I closed that night, so I took over the tables that were left so the other waiters could go home.”

“Great,” Louise said and pulled a chair back from a table, which had already been set, to lean on the backrest. “Can you remember what the man looked like?”

Olsen glanced over toward the table he said Susanne had been sitting at. “They were a calm, quiet couple. I think they had kind of a pricey meal.”

“How did he pay?” Louise asked, maintaining eye contact with Olsen. “Try to remember if he paid with a credit card,” she asked.

“He didn’t. I’m sure of that. He paid in cash, and I’m not all that sure that he was Danish.” Something suddenly occurred to him. “When I put the sweater into our lost-and-found, I told the other waiters that no one was ever going to come claim it... and I said that because I felt like they were tourists.”

Louise was losing hope that this would lead to anything at all. If nothing else, Susanne would have at least noticed if Jesper Bjergholdt had spoken with an accent.

Olsen shrugged. “You’ll have to excuse me, but I couldn’t really tell you that for sure. We see too many customers in here for me to be able to keep them all straight, and especially when it comes to customers I didn’t even serve. But I’m sure it was her.” He pointed to Susanne’s photo. “And I’m sure she was sitting with a dark-haired man, who I assumed was a foreigner. I can’t tell you any more than that with any degree of certainty.”

Louise thanked him and stuffed the photo back in her purse. Then she started toward the exit with Susanne’s sweater over her arm, thinking it would probably be a good idea to send it down to the crime-scene investigators. Not that it was very likely they would find anything on it, but it was worth a try.

—

“R
ESTAURANT
B
ALKONEN,” SHE SAID IN RESPONSE TO THE HOPEFUL LOOK
Lars gave her. Then she shook her head and added, “Nada.”

She stuffed Susanne’s sweater into one of the CSI’s paper sacks, wrote the case number on the outside, and put it on the bookshelf by the door so she would remember to drop it off.

“They ate there, and she left this. Bjergholdt paid in cash. Strangely the waiter was able to remember that, but otherwise his recollections were pretty limited.”

She went in and dropped off her report for Heilmann.

“I’ve got the names of twelve women who exchanged messages with ‘Mr. Noble,’” Lars said when she walked back in.

“Have you contacted any of them?” she asked.

“Not yet. But when you set up a profile, you have to provide an e-mail address.” He showed her a piece of paper with a list of e-mail addresses on it.

“Do you have to give your own e-mail address?” Louise looked at him in surprise, assuming up until this point that people could just set up dummy accounts.

“It’s only visible to the company that runs the site, so they can send information to their customers.”

She noticed a quiet germ of anticipation starting to sprout. They hadn’t hit a total brick wall. Once they pinned down the description a little more, she would talk to Susanne again, and then they could go to the press and search for him. She felt a primal joy at the thought of interrogating him after they caught him.
Just you wait, you sadistic pig
, she thought and went over to find the folder for the case on Kim Jensen from Hørsholm, who’d disappeared into thin air. Karin Hvenegaard was the name of the woman he had raped. She lived in Rødovre, and Louise wrote the phone number down on her notepad and picked up the phone.

She sat drumming her fingers on her desk while she waited for the phone to be picked up. A quiet click told her it had gone to voicemail; but instead of the subscriber’s own voice, there was a recorded operator’s voice saying that the number was no longer in service. Louise sighed and hung up. She called information and asked if there was a new number for that name.

“It’s unlisted,” the woman replied.

Louise went through the slightly complicated procedure the police used to circumvent the standard security measures and access unlisted numbers.

“She doesn’t have a landline, and there’s no cell-phone number listed for that address,” the woman said after an artificial pause.

“Thanks,” Louise said and hung up, thinking it might not hurt to drive out to the address the next day. She dialed Heilmann’s extension and explained that Karin Hvenegaard no longer had a phone. She could tell from Heilmann’s voice that she wasn’t going to sanction Louise putting this off until tomorrow, so she hurried to add that she’d find her in the Danish national population registry and then go pay her a visit in person.

She knew she wouldn’t make it home in time for dinner now, but Peter was prepared for that, and it occurred to her that she didn’t even know if he was home. His New Year’s resolution seemed to be working, because it had been a long time since he’d complained about her unpredictable work hours.

She packed up her bag and nodded absent-mindedly to Lars, who was talking on the phone. Thoughts of Peter were running through her head. She didn’t have the least desire to live apart from him, but she also didn’t feel any pressure to spend time with him, either, now that he lived with her. Although they’d been going together for six years, she’d been afraid, when Peter moved into her apartment, that living together would start making her feel chronically suffocated; but to her own surprise, she was actually enjoying his being there. She had quietly admitted to herself that her dread of his being a ball and chain had proven to be unfounded, and she had slowly forced it out of her mind. She was starting to have a much more relaxed view of their future together.

B
LOMMEVEJ.
L
OUISE WAS DRIVING OUT ALONG
R
OSKILDEVEJ, THE
highway from Copenhagen to Roskilde, keeping her eyes peeled for Tårnvej, where she was supposed to take a right. From there, she was supposed to find the road that went down to the neighborhood with all the row houses. She was concentrating on driving and looking for the right address; but although she was close, she was having a hard time seeing any system to the numbering. So she decided to park and search for 211F on foot.

The first conversation she’d had with Karin Hvenegaard two years earlier had been at the Center for Victims of Sexual Assault, the same place she’d taken Susanne. Karin had come in to the police headquarters a couple of times since then, but Louise had never been out to her house before.

She pulled over in front of a small cluster of two-story houses. Number 211F was on the second floor, but there wasn’t any name on the mailbox. Louise was starting to suspect that Karin didn’t live here anymore, or maybe she’d just listed the Blommevej address as her permanent address and lived someplace else that they didn’t have on record. Louise rang the doorbell and leaned against the railing while she waited.

When the door opened, Louise recognized Karin right away, even though she had a totally different air about her now than the way Louise remembered her. She hadn’t shrunk in a physical sense. And yet there wasn’t much left of the woman who, even in the battered and miserable state she had been in two years earlier, had projected so much more vitality than the woman standing in the doorway before her now. She was hunched over, fear in her eyes, which were looking more downward than straight ahead. It was obvious that she remembered Louise, but she did not seem surprised or curious. She just stood there, with a neutral expression, waiting for whatever was going to come.

“Could I come in?” Louise asked after a second.