37.
There was no sign of Karl and the Crime Scene Investigators when Eddy and Katrine emerged from the lift on the eighth floor of the block at Gellerupparken. The flat from which Girlie fell was still sealed off, but the Forensic team had gone. Katrine called Karl Lund.
“We finished at two o’clock this morning,” he said. “I’ll have preliminary results for you in a couple of hours. Busy spot, that flat. Some traffic. I’d say we have the fingerprints and DNA of half the men in Aarhus. Plus three boxes of condoms, three boxes of baby wipes, four vibrators, a two-litre bottle of massage oil, a feather duster, a set of handcuffs and a riding crop.”
“Did you find her phone?”
“We found a phone in the bushes near the block. It’s probably hers. We won’t be sure until we match fingerprints.”
“The killer’s number might be in it,” said Katrine. She crossed her fingers. “And Philippines numbers. We need to contact her next of kin.”
It was not a call Katrine wanted to make.
Eddy had counted five doors down to the other flat that was used as a brothel. He rang the doorbell. There was no reply. He knocked. No reply. He thumped the door. No reply. He shrugged.
“She’s probably sucking a dick somewhere else. Let’s go.”
They went directly to the Forensics laboratory. Karl Lund was dusting a mobile phone for prints. They watched him pass the phone under the UV lamp.
“Clean as a whistle,” said Karl. “The screens on these phones are usually smothered in prints. But not this one. It’s been wiped.”
“It must be her phone,” said Katrine. “Are there Philippines numbers in it?”
“No,” said Karl. “Everything was deleted.”
“Bastard,” said Katrine.
“Clever bastard,” said Eddy. “When a woman’s assaulted, the bastard is usually too drunk or too stupid to get rid of prints or DNA. This bastard is different. My guess is none of the prints or fluid traces we found are his. I hope I’m wrong.”
“You’re right,” said Karl. “If he wipes a mobile phone and deletes all the number before he throws it away, he won’t leave prints anywhere else. He was probably wearing gloves.” He paused. “I bet he’s done this before.”
“We think the same guy beat her up ten days ago,” said Eddy. “He might have left a tiny trace of something, somewhere. But I’m not holding my breath.”
Katrine took a gulp of air into her lungs before she followed Eddy into the autopsy room. She had not yet rid herself of a gagging reflex whenever she entered that cold space that smelled of blood and formaldehyde.
Harry Norsk tipped something into a stainless steel bowl. Katrine looked away.
Harry smiled. “Hi, guys. I see you get a bit green around the gills, Katrine. A sip of brandy usually does the trick.” He pointed to a small white wall cabinet with a green cross on the door.
Eddy grinned. He opened the cupboard, took out a half-bottle of brandy and poured a capful into a glass beaker.
Harry lifted Girlie’s liver from the bowl and placed it on a set of scales.
“This unfortunate woman wasn’t a drinker,” he said. “I bet your liver isn’t as healthy as that, Eddy.”
Katrine was white-faced. Eddy gave her the beaker of brandy.
“She has extensive injuries and bruising,” said Harry. “Five broken ribs, a black eye, bruising on her stomach and inner thighs. These injuries are all about ten days old. I’d say she was still in pain from them. She hadn’t had sex recently. She was probably still too sore. There was no sperm in any orifice. No material or skin under her fingernails. Her neck was broken when she fell. That’s what killed her.”
We killed her, thought Katrine. If we stayed with her in the hospital, she’d still be alive. She glanced at Eddy. He was staring at the bloodless body on the stainless steel table.
“We’ll catch him,” he said. “We’ll find the fucker who did this.”
Katrine thought it sounded like a promise.
When she got back to the office, an envelope from registry was in her pigeonhole. Inside was a file labelled Lennart Praetorius. She began reading it as she walked to her desk. She was still absorbed when Eddy looked over her shoulder.
“The grandparents mention the watch,” she said. “That would have been enough to identify Bogman.”
“But not who killed him,” said Eddy. He perched on her desk. “Anything else interesting?”
“They hadn’t seen him since May 1998,” said Katrine. “They spoke to him on the phone about four months after that, perhaps longer. Their contact with him was intermittent. They went to the police again in February 2001. It’s pretty much what they told the boss and me on Sunday. There’s not much else. Lennart didn’t turn up on any database. The only known address for him was the grandparents’ house in Helsinger.” She paused. “But this is interesting. His last call to them was from a mobile phone, a new one, the grandparents said. Lennart told them he’d only just got it. But he didn’t give them the number. The call ended abruptly. Lennart said something like, “Oh, there’s the ambulance coming down the track. That’s Emily, back from the lily pond. Bye.”
“The lily pond? Sounds like a Chinese take-away,” said Eddy.
“The police checked calls to the grandparents landline from mobile phones,” said Katrine. “There weren’t many. An electrician, someone from their church, a plumber and one number which was defunct.” Katrine’s voice slowed as she relayed the information to Eddy. “The phone company said the mobile hadn’t been topped up and no calls had been made since the date of the call to the grandparents on September 21st, 1998. At 9.30pm.” Her voice quickened with excitement. “They gave the co-ordinates of the nearest base station when he made that call.”
Eddy sprang off his perch and gripped Katrine’s shoulder as she brought a map up on her computer screen.
“Zoom out,” he said. “Let’s see what’s nearby.”
Katrine enlarged the area on the map around the base station. In the left hand corner of the screen they saw Roligmose.
“I’ll call the boss,” said Eddy.
Tobias was watching the cadaver dog, an incongruously cheerful golden spaniel, and her handler, a craggy, former Special Forces soldier, moving across the bog. The dog worked in twenty-minute bursts, straining on the leash, nose to ground. The sun was low in the sky, below a bank of dark grey cloud. Tobias thought he could smell rain coming, in the way the spaniel, now making its way back to the dog-van, could smell a decomposing corpse. He heard the familiar buzz of his phone, put it to his ear, listened to Eddy telling him about Lennart’s last call to his grandparents.
“Lennart must have made the call from Roligmose,” said Eddy. “It’s in the area covered by the nearest mast. The call ended abruptly. Lennart said, “Bye now. I see Emily coming back from the lily pond.” There’s a Chinese restaurant ten kilometres away called The Lily Pond.”
Tobias pictured Lennart standing in the bog, talking on the phone. Was he alone, or with someone else? Emily bumping down the track in the blue ambulance with a Chinese takeaway supper, Lennart breaking off the call. And what then?
“So they were here at Roligmose on the 21st September,” said Tobias. “On their own, or with someone else. Astrid Thomsen got an email from Emily on 24th September saying she was going away with Lennart. Did they split up after that, or…?”
“She’d already killed him, and skipped off to join the Eskimos,” said Eddy.
Thursday: Week Three
38.
Eddy adjusted the viewing screen in the Incident Room and checked a set of images on his laptop. He looked around. Katrine was pinning photographs to a board on the wall. They were all copies of the images Eddy was going to show on the screen.
Chief Superintendent Larsen, Tobias, Karl Lund, Harry Norsk and Renata Molsing filed into the room and took chairs in front of the screen.
“Everybody here? Right? Let’s see what you’ve got, Haxen,” said Larsen.
The first image flashed on to the screen. A round face with regular features, bright eyes and smoothed back hair. Katrine thought it a face full of hope. She felt a rush of compassion for the young woman who thought she was on her way to a well-paid job and a better life, and found instead a sordid job and a brutal death.
“Girlie Corazon Sanchez,” said Eddy. “Thirty-one years old. Victim of a scam that lured her to Denmark six months ago. When she had this photograph taken for her passport, she believed she was coming to a job at UNICEF in Copenhagen. The job didn’t exist. She paid a fake agency thousands of dollars – we don’t know the exact amount. The scam is still being investigated both here and in the Philippines. As far as we are aware, no one has been arrested.”
Larsen uttered a short, sardonic bark.
The next slide showed Girlie’s expressionless face in death; her bruised eyes, mercifully shut.
“Girlie became a sex-worker in Gellerup,” said Eddy. “Her pimp is a Turkish man who is also an informant for PET. Two weeks ago, she was dumped at the hospital. She’d been badly beaten. Skaarup and I interviewed her at the Sexual Assault Centre. She wouldn’t say anything about her attacker. She seemed frightened of him. We thought, wrongly, it was her husband, her partner or her pimp. Unfortunately she left hospital before she could be interviewed again by us or by Immigration.”
Larsen grunted. “Unfortunately is an understatement, Haxen. But I’ll say no more. Immigration must take their share of the blame.” He gestured impatiently. “Get on with it.”
“She went to an advice centre and spoke to a volunteer called Irene Voss. She told Irene Voss she’d been attacked by a client. She was afraid if she went to the police, she’d be deported. Irene Voss gave Girlie her telephone number.”
A third image flashed up. A faceless, bulky shape that almost filled the screen.
“Girlie sent this photo to Irene Voss. She must have taken it seconds before she fell, was pushed, from the balcony of the flat.”
The balcony now appeared on the screen, followed by a close-up of the balcony ledge showing a wisp of yellow cotton snagged on the grey brickwork.
“We think the abusive client came back. Girlie recognised him and managed to take and send this photo. We surmise he realised this. He wrestled the phone from her. There’s evidence of a struggle.”
Eddy clicked on the next image, the interior of the flat. Overturned chairs, plates, cutlery, the remnants of chips on the floor, the unmade bed, the sofa.
“Is that blood?” asked Renata.
“Ketchup,” said Eddy. “We think she was eating when her attacker arrived.”
“The meal was still in her stomach,” said Harry Norsk.
The final image – Girlie’s body, splayed on the concrete path - appeared on the screen.
“The immediate cause of death was a broken neck,” said Harry. “She had broken ribs and multiple bruising from injuries sustained two weeks earlier. She would not have had the strength to fight back.”
“And there’s no possibility she could have jumped from the balcony to escape her attacker?” asked Renata.
““The fragment of cotton is from the back of her T shirt,” said Karl. “An exact match.”
“What about contacting her next of kin?” asked Renata.
“I’ve told the Philippine’s Embassy,” said Katrine.
“Is Irene Voss in danger?” asked Tobias.
“We don’t think so,” said Katrine. “The perpetrator deleted all the numbers from the phone. Plus he’ll have looked at the photo she sent. He’s unrecognisable. It’s not much help to us, unfortunately.”
“I don’t want to hear that word again,” said Larsen. “Tell me something useful.”
“We can play around with the image and get some sense of his height and weight,” said Karl.
“This is one clever bastard,” said Eddy. “He wiped the phone.
My guess is none of the prints in the flat will be his. He probably wore gloves. He’s done this before. Irene Voss said another sex worker, also an illegal, was attacked a few months back.”
“Same perpetrator?” asked Larsen.
“We don’t know at this stage, Sir. We’re trying to trace the sex worker. Apparently she moved to Copenhagen afterwards. We’ve alerted Immigration, and Vice.”
“Needle in a haystack,” said Larsen resignedly.
He thought for a moment. “Alsing’s team is still tied up waiting for the Danske gang to assemble. He thinks they can bag the lot. I don’t want to jeopardise that. You’ll have to handle this on your own, Haxen. Skaarup can work with both you and Chief Inspector Lange. What I want to know is this – are the bones that keep turning up anything to do with this case? Are they the bones of sex workers murdered by this same perpetrator?”
They all considered this possibility silently for a few moments.
“We don’t have duplicate bones,” said Harry. “If we had two ulna, for example, instead of just one, we could see if they’re a match, if we’re dealing with one body or more. We should get the results of carbon dating by next week. Brix is trying DNA amplification. That should tell us if there is more than one victim. It can’t help with identification, of course, unless we have DNA to compare it with.”
“I don’t want even a whisper outside this room that there could be multiple victims,” said Larsen. “Got that? I’ll brief the media centre about the Filipina. I’ll have a word with Immigration as well. Keep me informed of developments. Right?”
He turned to Tobias.
“What’s the latest on Bogman?”
“I’ve got an address for a green activist who knew Emily Rasmussen,” said Tobias. “He might know where she is.”