“There’s no photograph,” said Astrid. “But she’s the only Emily Rasmussen in Lapland. It says Sapmi, but I know that’s Lapland. Emily liked Lapland. She told me she liked it. I think she went back there with her boyfriend. I think she’s there now.”
“You think, but you don’t know,” said Tobias.
“I know it in my heart,” said Astrid. “I know it in my bones.”
Marcus Thomsen accompanied Tobias and Katrine to their car. He glanced back at the house. Astrid was at the window, white-faced, puffing on a cigarette.
“My wife is distraught about all this,” said Marcus. “I have to say, given all the grief Emily has caused us, if and when she gets in contact, I’d cheerfully wring her neck.” He held up both hands and smiled. “I don’t mean that seriously of course. But between you and me, she was difficult. She was jealous of me and possessive about her mother. Came and went without telling us. Used the house like a hotel. Astrid would go to make dinner and discover Emily had raided the fridge and the cupboards.”
“Emily made some accusations against you,” said Tobias.
Marcus waved the unspoken accusations away. “I forgave her,” he said. “She suffered from depression after her father died. He died suddenly. It came at a bad time in her life. Frankly, she didn’t like me taking her father’s place and her mother’s attention. I could understand. I did my best, but,” he shrugged, “my best wasn’t good enough.”
“Was Emily ever violent?” asked Katrine.
Marcus thought for a moment. “There was a bit of door banging. Some sulks. Nothing more. I’m sorry we can’t be more help. There’s nothing Astrid and I would like more than to see Emily again.”
“We might be able to trace her through Hotmail and Facebook,” said Katrine.
“I hope you find her,” said Marcus.
“So do we,” said Tobias.
He was silent on the way back to Aarhus. If Agnes went away and never said where she was, his heart would break. How did Astrid Thomsen bear it? When he brought the car to a halt in the car park at headquarters, he took his phone from his jacket and gestured to Katrine to go ahead. He called Agnes. There was no reply. He texted her. “Thinking about you, Pumpkin. Hope all well.” He got out of the car and stood for a moment gazing at a small patch of blue in an otherwise grey sky. What was it his father used to say? Enough blue for a sailor’s trousers? A message flashed up on his phone. “Hi, Dad. All well. X.” His heart lightened. He put the phone back in his pocket and switched his thoughts to Emily Rasmussen and the fastest way to find her.
When he got back to the office, Katrine was searching for Emily on Facebook.
“There are dozens of Emily Rasmussens,” she told him. “But I think this is the right one.”
She swivelled the screen so that Tobias could see a postage-stamp sized, faceless, head and shoulders image, and the name Emily Rasmussen
.
The only other words on the screen were “Emily lives in Sapmi.”
“The privacy setting is high,” said Katrine. “It’s one way traffic. Emily can find friends and get in touch. But they can’t contact Emily.”
“Get me the file on Emily’s complaint about her stepfather,” said Tobias. “There might be something useful in it. But I’m not holding my breath.”
“I’ve checked the National Register,” Eddy called out to them. “The only address for Emily Rasmussen, date of birth 23rd March 1976, is the Skovlynd address where she was living with her mother and stepfather, before they moved.”
“Ask the best people-tracer in Denmark,” said Tobias. “The taxman.”
Thursday: Week Two
25.
“Two sets of bones in two weeks?” said Larsen. “First Bogman, now this lot. I don’t like it. I don’t like coincidence. I want the same team to work on both cases. Right? So let’s get on with it. What can you tell us, Harry?”
“The bones,” Harry Norsk pointed to a row of photographs displayed on a screen in the Incident Room, “were found in two different places. The arm bones were dumped in an underground bin in Gellerupparken.” He put his forefinger on a red dot on the street map of Aarhus next to the photographs. “The ribs were found in a bin here,” he stabbed a second red dot on the map, “at the harbour.”
“You have no idea where they came from or who put them there, right?” said Larsen. “And they’re definitely human bones.”
“No question,” said Harry Norsk.
“Are they from the same person?” asked the prosecutor, Renata Molsing.
“I think so,” said Harry. “But I’m waiting for Brix’s opinion. He’s sent them for carbon dating.”
“More cost,” said Larsen. “Carbon dating isn’t cheap. Have you any theories on how or when this person died, assuming the bones are from the same person?”
“There’s a crack in one of the ribs and a fracture in the ulna. I can’t say what caused these but they were ante mortem. The breaks weren’t caused by being in the rubbish. They occurred when the person was alive. Brix will be able to tell us more. And we should have the carbon dating results next week.”
“We could be wasting our time as well as our money,” said Larsen. “What crime are we investigating?”
“It’s a crime if the bones have been stolen from a hospital or museum,” said Renata Molsing. “It’s a crime to dig up a grave, unless it’s an official exhumation.”
“I’ve checked with all the hospitals in the city,” said Katrine. “I’m searching for reports of graves being dug up or disturbed. Nothing in the last two weeks. That’s the longest rubbish is left before being collected.”
“Maybe whoever did this has dumped bones before and they weren’t been spotted by the waste collectors,” said Renata.
“Where are we on Bogman?” asked Larsen.
Tobias got to his feet and stood to one side of a screen displaying an enlarged photograph of Emily.
“Emily Rasmussen,” said Tobias, “former girlfriend of Bogman and the key to identifying him. We know his first name is Lennart. A Swedish silversmith made the bracelet found with his remains. It was ordered and paid for by Emily Rasmussen. The bracelet is dated 1997. We know Emily and Lennart were together then in Northern Sweden, in Vasterbotten county, Lapland or Sapmi as we’re supposed to call it. We know they were there in the summers of 1997 and 1998. They took part in a protest against a nuclear waste facility. They played at a concert. They drove a converted ambulance with a rainbow design. In fact they lived in it. We know they came back to Denmark at the end of the summer of 1998 because Emily had an argument with her mother and left home in September 1998.” Tobias paused. “Emily is estranged from her mother. They haven’t spoken in the last fourteen years. They fell out because Emily told the police her stepfather, Marcus Thomsen, had illegal porn on his computer. We don’t know if it was kiddy porn but it’s a fair guess. Emily’s mother wouldn’t talk about it. She says the police took away the computer and found nothing. No charges were brought. She says the police were going to charge Emily with wasting police time but Thomsen asked them not too. I’ve asked for the file.” He glanced at Katrine.
“I sent the request yesterday,” she said. “Registry said it might take a day or two. They’re understaffed.”
“If Emily was jealous enough to accuse her stepfather of being a paedophile and was possessive about her mother,” said Eddy. “How would she have reacted if Lennart went off with someone else?”
“Badly,” said Katrine.
“You think Emily Rasmussen might have something to do with Bogman’s murder?” asked Larsen.
“It’s possible,” said Katrine.
“The silversmith said they were in love,” said Tobias. “Inseparable.”
“They why didn’t she report him missing?” asked Eddy.
“Perhaps they fell out of love,” said Katrine. “Or one of them fell in love with someone else. It happens.”
“Even so, you’d think she’d hear on the grapevine that he’d gone missing,” said Larsen.
“Suppose they’d split up,” said Renata. “He stayed in Denmark. She went back to Sweden. She didn’t know he was missing. She doesn’t know he’s dead.”
“That’s also possible,” said Tobias.
“At the very least, she’s a witness. We need to find her,” said Renata.
“I’ve asked Sweden to put out a general alert,” said Tobias.
“She hasn’t filed a tax return,” said Eddy. “Inland Revenue have her listed at the Skovlynd address. She has a passport issued in 1996. It hasn’t been renewed. She has claimed no benefits, committed no traffic offences.”
“She must have kept in touch with somebody,” said Katrine. “She must have some friends here.”
“Presumably they don’t know Lennart is dead,” said Eddy. “There’s been no report in the newspapers. This all happened fourteen years ago. No instant messaging then. Not so many people had email. It was easier to lose touch with people."
“Emily sends emails once a year from a Hotmail address and she has a page on Facebook,” said Tobias. “Can we trace her that way, Renata?”
“It’s complicated, and costly,” said Renata. “Where’s Facebook based?”
“Seattle,” said Eddy.
Renata groaned. “And Hotmail is also based in the United States. I wish she used a Danish or any European-based site. There’d still be a lot of procedure to go through but it would be easier than trying to get information from a server in the United States. There are different privacy laws, international treaties, protocols. I have to ask the Ministry of Justice to approve an approach to the American authorities. The Ministry will have to issue a warrant. We need to show good cause. The Americans have to agree good cause before they approve a warrant to disclose data. Plus, most of this stuff is held remotely.”
“Data tracking is done by civilian specialists,” said Larsen. “They don’t come cheap.”
“And they need time,” said Renata. “There’s so much stuff out there in cyberspace, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Larsen tut-tutted. “We need to justify all this expense. There must be other ways of identifying Lennart.”
“They were both members of an environmental protest group,” said Tobias. “They tried to stop the development of a golf course at Skovlynd. There should be newspaper reports, television coverage.”
“Then start with that,” said Larsen.
26.
Tobias and Katrine spent the rest of the day at the television station viewing the available footage on the demonstrations against the Skovlynd golf development. Most of it showed demonstrators with placards - “
Stay Green
–
Say NO to Golf
”; “
Skovlynd Forest. Home to Bechstein’s Bat
” – sitting down in the road to block the path of machinery and being removed by the police. There was no violence. There was no Emily either.
The edit suite was hot, dark and untidy. Tobias was uncomfortable. The bin overflowed with paper, there were empty paper cups on the floor and the remains of a hotdog on a paper plate at the elbow of Oscar, the technician, who was chewing gum. Tobias tried not to look. He was about to suggest they take a break, go outside, feel the breeze, maybe have a cold beer, when Katrine said, “Hold on, a moment. Can you stop it? Can you go back to the guy with the moustache talking to the reporter?”
The pictures reversed with the chipmunk squeaks of speech played back at speed, and stopped. An earnest looking reporter held a microphone to the moustachioed mouth of a young man with a pale face and long dark hair.
“Look,” said Katrine, leaning forward. “Behind his left shoulder. There’s a red car and next to it a blue van sticking out. Can you zoom in? There. You can see the wheels and handlebars of two bicycles on the top and a bit of rainbow on the back door. And the number plate. Yellow and white. Can you enlarge it?”
“I can freeze the frame and you can look at it on a bigger screen,” said Oscar.
A fuzzy image of the number plate flashed on to a screen in the bank of monitors in front of them.
“This is as good as I can get it,” said Oscar. “The first letter is S.”
“The second is N,” said Katrine.
“You two have good eyesight,” said Tobias. “Sort it out. I’m taking a breather.” He stepped into the sunlit corridor. The building had an empty, weekend feel. He opened a window and inhaled fresher air into his lungs. The phone in his pocket vibrated. He pulled it out and read the text message. “Back Tuesday pm. Dinner? Sofie.”
He felt invigorated. He went back into the edit suite.
Katrine waved a piece of paper. “We’re not sure if the last number is 5 or 3 but we’ve got the rest. I’ve texted Eddy. With both 5 and 3 as the last number.”
Tobias sat down, grinning. “Thanks. Good work. Who’s the guy with the moustache?”
Oscar glanced at a sheet of paper. “Interview at 49 seconds. Nicholas Hove.”
Tobias remembered the plump, clean-shaven man he’d seen talking to Kurt Malling at the Skovlynd charity dinner. Could this be the same man? “I saw him just over a week ago,” he said. “What a difference fourteen years makes. He’s twice as heavy and has half as much hair.”
He scanned the faces of the demonstrators sitting on the road behind Nicholas Hove. They were young. The girls had long blonde hair and serious expressions. They reminded him of Agnes. None of them was Emily. The boys looked relaxed. They grinned at the camera. Was one of these grinning boys Emily’s boyfriend, Lennart?
“Is Hove the only interviewee?”
Oscar checked a print out. “It looks like it. There are only two more reports. April 26
th
and 27
th
1998.”
Tobias settled into his seat. The next sequence of soundless pictures began.