“Not yet,” said Pernille. “I’m in the lab now. We’ll have a DNA profile by tomorrow.” She glanced at Magda for confirmation. Magda nodded. “We have a partial thumb print which we’re pretty sure is the perpetrator’s. But it doesn’t match any sex offenders, or anyone else for that matter, in the data base.”
“We’re questioning someone in connection with two murders,” said Tobias. “The first victim was assaulted a few weeks before she was murdered. Her attacker used her panties as a gag. We think he came back and murdered her. We found the skeleton of an earlier victim, years back. Probably twelve years back. We think it’s the same perpetrator because there were polyester fibres in her jaw. What else can you tell me about your case?”
“There’s a clear modus operandi,” said Pernille. “He uses black strips of cloth, plastic gloves, he gags the victim with her panties, he photographs or films them, and he picks on prostitutes.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve found four similar attacks in Europe in the last ten years. Not counting the latest one in Aalborg.” She recited them. “Esbjerg ten years ago, Pitea in Swedish Lapland, nine years ago, Stockholm two years ago. Arles in France last year. And the body washed up at Lonstrup, the one we think went into the sea at Hamburg a few months ago, had traces of fibres in her mouth as well.” She drew breath again. “What are the dates of the murders you’re investigating?”
“The first one is Emily Rasmussen. We found her skeleton. We think she was murdered in September 1998, or maybe a short time later. The second victim was murdered four days ago in Gellerupparken.”
“And you have a suspect?” said Pernille. “Good work. I’ll send you the thumb print and the files with photos.”
“Thanks, Pernille.” Tobias hung up.
He went to the viewing area from where he could see and hear Eddy and Katrine interviewing Erik Bak, aka Aksel Schmidt.
“You’ve told us you last saw Emily Rasmussen in the summer of 1998,” said Eddy. “Which month?”
“I can’t remember. July or August, I suppose. I can’t be sure. It’s so long ago.”
“Emily Rasmussen was in Sweden during July and August 1998,” said Katrine.
“Then maybe it was later,” said Asksel Schmidt. He sounded irritated.
“So, after January 1999?” said Eddy.
“I can’t remember. I was moving about from group to group. And the membership of these groups shifts and changes all the time.”
“Have you been undercover with green activists all the time?”
“Pretty much,” said Aksel. “Except for March and April last year. I was on a Europol training course in Norway.”
“Where were you two weeks ago? April eighteenth to be precise,” said Katrine.
Eric Bak shrugged. “I’m not sure. Probably in the squat.”
“Did you sexually assault a prostitute in Gellerupparken on that day?”
“Definitely not,” said Eric Bak.
“Did you subsequently murder the same prostitute?”
Erik Bak sat up. He was less relaxed now. “What?”
“Did you also sexually assault a prostitute from Thailand, who worked in Gellerupparken?”
“I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone,” he said.
“The man who beat assaulted the Thai sex worker told her he was an undercover police officer,” said Eddy.
“So?”
“You work undercover in Gellerupparken. You were with green activists in places from which emails were sent to Emily Rasmussen’s mother. Emails intended to make her think Emily was alive, when in fact she was dead.”
“What places? What emails?” Aksel was clearly rattled.
Tobias put his head around the door of the interview room and beckoned to Eddy and Katrine. They joined him in the viewing room from where they could see Eric Bak, fidgeting.
“Here’s a list of sexual assaults, similar pattern, over a period of at least ten years,” said Tobias. He handed the list to Katrine. “Find out where he was at the time of each attack. Have you fingerprinted him, or taken a DNA sample?”
“Not yet,” said Eddy.
“We should have the DNA profile tomorrow. Pernille Madsen is sending over a print as well. It should be here by now. If it matches, we’ve got him.”
“Go home, Boss,” said Eddy. “Relax. Get some sleep. Skaarup and I can deal with this.”
Tobias was tired. He had been up since before dawn. It was now almost nine o’clock in the evening.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
“With any luck we’ll have it all tied up and we can all take the day off,” said Eddy.
“I’ll take the files home, just in case,” said Tobias.
Sofie telephoned as he was parking the car in the square below his apartment.
“I saw the news reports,” she said. “The skeleton in the lake at Skovlynd. The speculation it might be Emily Rasmussen.”
“We can’t be one hundred per cent sure until we get the DNA results.”
“You think it’s Emily?”
“I can’t say yet,” said Tobias.
“You know it’s Emily. I can tell from your voice.”
Tobias didn’t contradict her.
“Astrid is in a terrible state. She telephoned me. She wants to go on believing Emily is alive.”
“Have a drink with me this evening. It’s a beautiful evening.”
“I can’t. Sorry.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I’m going to France tomorrow evening. Kurt is entertaining some potential partners in his chateau business. He wants me there.”
“Why?” Was he sounding jealous? He didn’t want to sound jealous.
“Are you jealous?” Sofie laughed. “He needs me there because I speak French.”
“What’s the name of the chateau?”
“Chateau Sentout. It’s near Arles. We’re flying down tomorrow. Me, Kurt, Marcus and the architect. The usual suspects.” She paused. “I’ll be back on Tuesday evening. We can do something then if you like.”
Third time lucky? Tobias smiled. “That would be nice. Dinner? I’ll book something.”
“Text me on Tuesday,” said Sofie.
47.
Tobias sat for a moment before getting out of the car. The files were in the pocket of the door. He picked them up, carried them to the apartment and set them down on the table by the French window. It was dusk. The sky above the rooftops was rose pink shading to indigo. He stepped on to the balcony and inhaled the cool night air scented with lilac and cherry blossom. He left the balcony door ajar when he went back into the room. He chose Scarlatti sonatas played by Mikhail Pletnev to accompany his methodical movements around the kitchen as he assembled a supper of Beemster Very Old cheese, a handful of walnuts and a slice of dark rye bread. He felt relaxed. Was it the music? Was it the sense of a job finished? He looked forward to a good night’s sleep after an exhausting day.
He woke in the middle of the night. Something was bothering him. What had been dreaming about? He couldn’t remember. An idea, a word, something, was darting about in his brain, eluding capture. What was it? There was air in the room. He slept with the window open. He was neither too hot nor too cold. He tried an old trick for dealing with his rare bouts of insomnia - playing a Bach prelude in his head, imagining the precise fingering, the weight of each note, the tempo. It was no use. He could not concentrate while the gadfly thought was in his head. He got up.
He poured himself a whiskey, added a dash of water, and stood on the balcony to drink it. The buildings all around were dark, the cafes and bars in the square had closed. The lights had gone out in the buildings all around, even in the cafes and bars in the square. The floodlit spire of the cathedral stood out against the night sky and the moon rode high above it. It was a night for romance, and he was alone. He imagined Sofie in a four-poster bed in the French chateau. Where was it exactly? He sat down at the table and opened his laptop and searched for Chateau Sentout, near Arles. The result flashed on to the screen.
Chateau Sentout is a castle in the commune of Saint-Desir de Provence in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône in southern France. In 1994 it was listed as a Monument Historique.
The chateau was built in the 1680s by Gerard Peltier who built boats (barques)which transported wine on the river Rhone. His son, Jean-Marc Peltier, planted vineyards on the property and was ennobled by Louis XV for supplying wine to the new light infantry regiments. The chateau was the principal residence of his descendants until the late 19th century when they began using it as a summer residence only. The chateau gradually fell into a state of disrepair.
Wine production declined after the Second World War. The last official harvest was in 1980. In 1990 the chateau, by now almost in ruins, was sold to a construction company which intended to build housing to serve the expanding city of Arles (15km). The plan was opposed by the local commune and the French Heritage Society and the chateau was designated a Monument Historique. The new owners have promised to restore the building and maintain its special architectural character.
There was a link to a photograph in a local newspaper. It showed a handsome baroque style building with turrets and mansard roofs. The walls were standing. The roofs had fallen in. Scaffolding covered half of the building. Nobody could possibly stay there. So where did she stay? The nearest big town, he supposed. Arles. That was the gadfly word his brain had been chasing. He had come across it in the files.
He opened the file and found the list Katrine had compiled, matching the ISPs of the emails to green protests. The Shell refinery in Fredericia; oil drilling in Pitea and Hurtigruten; nuclear waste in Hamburg; the wind farm near Aalborg; bullfighting in Arles. She hadn’t identified anything near Esbjerg and nothing in particular in Copenhagen, but there was always some kind of protest going on in the capital.
He was sure Pernille Madsen had mentioned Arles. Wasn’t it one of the places where a prostitute had been assaulted? Gagged with her panties, like Girlie and, every instinct told him, Emily Rasmussen.
He searched the file for the list Pernille Madsen had sent from Aalborg. Yes! Arles leapt out at him. Arles, April fifteenth, a year ago. Amina Okonjo an illegal immigrant working as a prostitute had been found by a physiotherapist leading a group of heart patients on an early morning walk. She had two black eyes, broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. She told the police she’d been gagged with her own panties and punched and thumped by a client. He didn’t speak French. Her pimp had driven her to a clinic and dumped her in the grounds.
The cathedral bells rang out. Tobias started. Normally his brain filtered out the constant ringing of the bells. Another, recent, memory was dislodged. Erik Bak: “I was on a Europol training course in Norway.”
Tobias pulled Erik Bak’s service record from the file. There it was in clear print. April ninth until May eleventh.
Bergen:
Weapons Training and Surveillance Methodology
. Erik Bak could not have assaulted a prostitute or sent an email from an Internet hub in Arles on the fourteenth of April.
There was one other person who could have sent that email.
Tobias opened the file on Emily Rasmussen’s complaint against her stepfather. Words sprang at him as he read. Gagged. Blood.
Bruised. Tied up. Vomit. Fear. Dead.
He poured himself another whiskey and went on reading.
The telephone call from Emily Rasmussen to the police in Skandeborg was logged at 8am. Emily told the officer who took the call that she had found violent sexual pornography on her stepfather’s laptop. She had gone to her stepfather’s study to consult an atlas. She thought he had gone to work. The laptop was open on his desk. She glanced at it and saw a photograph of a woman bound, gagged, her face covered in blood. The picture changed. Now there was a different woman on the screen. She was gagged and spreadeagled. Her thighs were covered in blood. She appeared to be dead. She clicked through more images: women gagged and bound, their faces beaten to pulp, bruises on their stomachs and inner thighs, vomit in their hair, blood trickling from their noses.
Emily heard her stepfather speaking to her mother downstairs. She ran from the study to her room. Her stepfather went into the study. Emily went downstairs and telephoned the police. She told her mother what she’d seen and what she had done. The two women went upstairs to confront Marcus Thomsen. He flew into a rage, accused Emily of lying and slammed the study door. Emily and her mother waited outside the room until the police arrived approximately fifteen minutes after the call was made. Marcus Thomsen denied having images on his computer. He said Emily was jealous and delusional. The police checked the laptop, a Gateway Solo 9100, on the spot. They found no pornographic images. Emily said Marcus Thomsen must have switched laptops. The police searched the room. No second laptop was found. Emily was so insistent, the police continued searching, even taking up the floorboards. They then searched the rest of the house. No laptop was found. Emily was interviewed by the police. She stuck adamantly to her story. A police psychologist could find no evidence of schizophrenia or any mental disorder. Marcus Thomsen had no police record. Nor could the Skandeborg police find any reports of assaults on women.
Tobias closed his eyes to think. Could Emily have invented something which so exactly matched the modus operandi of the man who killed Girlie. And the Russian prostitute he dumped in the sea at Hamburg? Who almost certainly killed Emily?
It was like one of those locked room mysteries by Agatha Christie. The Mystery of the Missing Laptop. Could there have been a second laptop?
Tobias went out on to the balcony and took three deep breaths. The gardens below were early-morning still. A movement caught his eye. The fountain in the lily pond had sprung into life. Where had he seen a lily pond mentioned? He went back inside and leafed through the file on Bogman. It was in the notes on Lennart’s grandparents. His last words to them on the phone: “Bye now. I see Emily coming back from the lily pond.” The call was logged at 21.30 on the twenty-first of September 1998. Tobias frowned. It would be dark at that time in September. The headlights would have been on. Lennart couldn’t have seen who was driving the ambulance. Lily pond. Lily pond. He closed his eyes again and conjured up the house in Skandeborg. Judge Hendrikson’s house, where the Thomsen’s had been living when Emily disappeared. He saw again the gardener gazing into the pond at the side of the house. “
The same bloody heron has been taking the fish.
” The pond had been there when the Thomsen’s lived in the house. Where had Thomsen’s study been?