The House That Jack Built (15 page)

Friday
June 20

Chapter 32

T
he duty officer
called Sanne at 3:37 a.m. Martin was furious at being woken up; he slammed the phone against the wall. Sanne didn't have the energy to explain. She apologized on the phone. Her boyfriend had accidentally knocked the phone off the nightstand; no, there was nothing wrong.

The officer didn't buy it, but what was he going to say? He gave her the address and signed off with a “Have fun.”

Now she was sitting in a room at Gentofte Hospital. A young African woman was lying in bed, staring into space. The terror in the woman's healthy eye didn't disappear when she introduced herself. The woman had no papers and wouldn't declare an address. She spoke limited English.

The woman had a patch over her right eye. The duty nurse told them that when she had been brought in an hour earlier, her eye had been dangling on her cheek, attached only by the optic nerve and something-or-other that Sanne couldn't remember the name of. They had now more or less managed to get it in place, but they doubted they would be able to save her sight.

Sanne leaned closer. “What happened? Who did this to you?”

The woman shook her head. She tried to speak but nothing came out.

“Where are you from?” Sanne tried again. This time the woman lit up.

“Benin,” she answered. “Dahomey.”

The ambulance had picked her up on Brogårdsvej, by the roundabout. Several local residents had called and complained; one had shouted that a black whore was standing in the middle of the road screaming. That was more or less how the words had come out. By and large this was the sum of what the police knew. But Sanne had no doubt why the duty officer had called her. A prostitute with eye damage, likely done forcibly. A victim that had succeeded in getting away? Was this the mistake they'd been waiting for?

Benin. Sanne got up, smiled at the woman, and hurried out to the corridor. She called the duty officer on her cell.

“I'm going to need an interpreter. Yes, for whatever it is they speak in Benin. Yes, Africa. Thank you.”

Half an hour passed before a patrol car arrived with the interpreter. A large man with a gentle face introduced himself as Samuel. He started talking with the woman, but after a couple of sentences he turned around.

“We don't speak the same language.”

“But I asked for an interpreter from Benin?”

Samuel smiled. “We speak many languages in Benin. I speak Yoruba, she speak Fon Gbè. I can hardly understand. She speaks only a little French. I think she comes from the slum in one of the large cities in the south. Cotonou or Porto-Novo.”

Sanne nodded. They weren't going to be that lucky after all.

“Could you try anyway?” she asked. “Don't you understand any of it?”

Samuel shrugged. “I understand a little but it's difficult. I'm not sure it's correct.”

“Let's try anyway. Ask her what her name is.”

Slowly, over the next half hour, Samuel managed to draw out the woman's story. Her name was Abeiuwa and she was nineteen years old, from Benin, and, as Samuel had guessed, from the slum in Porto-Novo. She had been lured to Europe with the promise of a well-paid job — the classic story. She had arrived by plane from Nigeria to Torino, where she had been given her first rough introduction to her new profession. After several months in Torino she was sold again, this time to Rotterdam. Next stop was Copenhagen. She had been here for two months now. Sanne went cold inside, as she saw the realization in Abeiuwa's face. She would soon be sold off to another city, other men. The young woman knew it; she had long since accepted that this was what life had to offer her.

Her last client had picked her up on the corner of Vesterbrogade and Gasværksvej. Sanne tried getting a description, but all Abeiuwa was able to tell her was that he was old, wore glasses, and had a strange, strong smell.

Abeiuwa was about to perform oral sex on the customer when he drugged her with a cloth. When she woke up, she found herself in a dark room on a concrete floor filled with wooden boxes.

“And the dead were sitting there, on a chair and a sofa,” Samuel translated, furrowing his brow. “They had dead eyes.” Samuel pointed at his eyes. Abeiuwa started, pulled the comforter over her eyes.

“Botono,” she whispered, terror stricken.

Sanne tried reassuring her with a smile. “What did she say?”

“Botono. It's Vodun.”

Sanne sat back in the chair.

“Vodun? I think you'll have to explain that.”

“You call it voodoo but really it's Vodun. Vodun is one of our old religions. In Vodun, there is a creator, Nana Buluku, and there are many spirits, good and evil, who we call Vodun. And witches. Botono. They invoke bad spirits. She say the dead were Botono, or that the man who took her is a Botono and has invoked the dead who then are bad Vodun.”

Sanne nodded, pretending to understand. “What happened next?”

“This Botono drugged her again. When she wake up, he's removing her eye. She get away . . . I can't quite understand how.” Samuel shrugged. “She came out on the street. The lights hurt her eyes — her eye. She thought the lights were evil Vodun too, so she ran the other way. There was a lake. Suddenly she was standing on the road and the ambulance was there.”

“Can she tell us a little about the house? What did it look like?”

But Abeiuwa couldn't remember anything. She just wanted to get as far away as possible.

“Can you stay a little?” she asked Samuel. “The doctors will most likely want to talk with her afterwards.”

Samuel looked at his watch. “I can stay another hour, then I need to go to work.”

Sanne nodded and smiled at Akeiuwa, who was still lying in bed with the blanket covering the bottom of her face.

“Thanks,” she said. “I'm going to speak to the doctor. Could I have your number in case I need you again?”

Samuel scribbled his cell number down on an old bus ticket and sat down next to Abeiuwa's bed. Sanne hurried out of the room and down the corridor, asked for the doctor who had treated the girl.

While a nurse went to find the doctor, Sanne found a water fountain and filled a plastic cup. Fatigue slowed her down; her eyes were gritty with exhaustion. She took a sip of water, scanning a row of bright portraits on the wall above the fountain. Was that Professor Lau? She read the text on the small paper sign next to the picture. Professor Lau, Head of Ophthalmology at Gentofte Hospital from 1978. In the photo, he was younger, more slender. His hands were folded on his lap, almost feminine. She recalled his fleshy paws from the other day, the glass eye that nearly disappeared between his fingers.

“Ah,” the voice came from behind her. “I see you've met Professor Koes?”

Sanne only just avoided spurting water all over the younger doctor when she turned around. He was tall, with horn-rimmed glasses and a side part in his thick brown hair. He had a slightly arrogant bearing.

“Koes?”

The doctor nodded at the picture next to Professor Lau. An older man with a black comb-over, the sides shaved above the ears. He had bushy eyebrows and an impressive moustache.

“Koes founded this department back in the 1930s.”

“No, the one next to him, Lau. I met him on Tuesday.” She cleared her throat. “You received Abeiuwa?”

The doctor nodded, put his hands in his pockets. “Someone performed a very delicate enucleation on her only a few hours ago.”

“What exactly does that mean?”

The doctor looked over his horn-rimmed glasses. “Enucleation, in layman's terms, is the removal of the eyeball. The muscles that enable the eye to move are severed. Lateral rectus, inferior rectus . . .”

Sanne held up a hand. “Okay, thanks. The muscles are severed?”

The doctor sighed. “There are four. After that, the eyeball is attached only by the superior oblique and nervus opticus.”

“The optic nerve. But none of them were severed?”

“No. If we assume that the plan was to remove the entire eye, she got away before he got that far. I must add — it's wonderful work. The incisions in the muscle tissue are neat and clean.”

Chapter 33

D
ebriefing in Lars's
office. Yesterday's catastrophe was imprinted across the ashen, exhausted faces. Toke walked in, just back from the hospital where he had been to see Lene. He looked around the circle, despondent, and then slumped into the only available chair.

Lars allowed silence to descend. He had worked all night and morning with a restless energy unleashed by the amphetamine's release of noradrenaline and dopamine into the nerve tissue and of serotonin into the synaptic vesicles. But without any kind of usable result. The perp had gotten away. At some point over the course of the morning, sitting with a cup of coffee in the canteen, it had dawned on him. It wasn't enough that the rapist had worked out that it was a setup, that Lene was bait. In Assistens Cemetery, he had whistled to make sure that Lars wouldn't lose his trail. The only saving grace was that Lene hadn't suffered any serious injuries. A mild concussion, a gash on the eyebrow that had been stitched. That was it.

He'd be held accountable, he knew that. It was his responsibility. His team waited for him to say something, get the ball rolling, but his reserves were depleted. Even the amphetamine was useless now; it only sucked him dry. His legs bounced up and down at an insane pace.

“Okay,” he finally said, forcing his legs to calm down. “A police op that goes wrong is always front-page news. We have to expect that the press is going to be all over this now. Be careful who you speak with and what you say. If you're contacted by the press, refer them to me.”

No one spoke. Kim A scratched the back of his ear, smiled to himself. Toke's eyes were glued to the floor between his feet.

“Why doesn't a club like that have cameras recording people leaving?” Lisa asked.

Frank shrugged. “The entrance is where you get trouble.”

Something flashed through Lars's mind, an electric impulse that sent a shock through his tired, beaten-up body. He attempted to block out the conversation around him, the scraping of the chairs against the floor. Cameras. Video surveillance. Light. He looked up.

“There are no cameras filming people leaving Penthouse, but the 7-Eleven on the corner of Nørregade and Nørreport . . . I wonder, wouldn't there be a camera there?”

“How would that help?” Frank stared out the window.

“Yes, dammit,” said Lisa. “Both Stine and Lene walked down Nørregade past Nørreport. If the perp followed them from Penthouse . . .”

Lars headed down to the canteen. It was empty at this time of the day. Just inside the door, a female officer he didn't recognize was sitting with a newspaper and a cup of coffee. They nodded to each other. The rubber soles of his Converse stuck to the linoleum floor, producing a small, soft smack every time he raised his foot, a series of kisses following his every step. It couldn't be later than ten in the morning, and with the amphetamine in his bloodstream, his hunger was suppressed, but he thought he should have something. He hadn't eaten much the previous day. At the counter, he chose a greyish hamburger patty with potatoes and caramelized onions. He paid, poured a glass of water from the pitcher by the counter, and sat down at one of the tables at the very back. An abandoned copy of
Ekstra Bladet
had been left open on the neighbouring table.

He tore open the small blue and red salt and pepper sachets and sprinkled them generously over his food, vacantly studying the vegetable of the day. The two gherkins glistened under the fluorescent lights.

He started eating, grabbed the paper. The front page was filled with a large picture of a girl in a very low-cut dress. A black bar covered her eyes, but her clothes and surroundings revealed her profession. The headline in bold, black type: “Hookers on Vesterbro: ‘The Sandman can come and get us.'” He flipped to the pages the cover story referred to. A large spread summarized the case, describing Mira alongside a huge picture of the most recent victim in her hospital bed at Gentofte Hospital. She was nineteen years old and came from Benin in West Africa. The girl in the picture didn't look a day over seventeen. Her right eye was covered with a large white dressing. She looked scared and in shock.

When he folded up the paper, he realized he had finished eating. Using his tongue, he removed the last strands of meat from between his teeth. No flavour remained, just a greasy feeling running all the way down his throat. He emptied the glass of water in one go. How was Sanne doing? He really should thank her for that dinner. Was that on Monday? Five days ago already.

Ulrik appeared, walking toward him through the canteen with firm, purposeful steps. Some people just knew when their presence was unwanted.

Ulrik nodded, pulled out a chair, and sat across from Lars. “Mind if I sit here?”

He didn't want to speak to Ulrik. Today least of all.

“I heard about yesterday,” Ulrik began.

Lars pushed the cutlery around on the empty plate. His legs bounced up and down under the table. He nodded at the paper. “I see he's been at it again? And the papers have already given him a name: The Sandman.”

“What?” Ulrik glanced at the
Ekstra Bladet
next to Lars's plate. “Oh, yes, poor girl. But we were . . .” He leaned across the table, lowered his voice. “I've read Toke's report from yesterday and . . .” He stopped, fidgeted in the chair. “Why don't we go up to my office?”

Lars took a deep breath, forced his heart rate down. Was he going to take him off the rape case too? “I've got nothing to hide.”

“I see. Well, the fact of the matter is . . .” A single drop of sweat trickled down Ulrik's temple. “A complaint has been filed against you — your way of leading the investigation.” He went red, lowered his voice. “There are people on your team, people with seniority, who believe the case is crumbling. Leads not being followed up on . . .”

“Kim A,” Lars mumbled. “You know what this is about. You were there.”

“It's actually not that simple. Frank and Lisa have signed it too. Kim A isn't stupid. I have to respond to this.”

Lars clenched his fist under the table. Strictly speaking, it wasn't Ulrik's fault. Still, he had this urge to hit somebody right now. Hard.

“Lars, I'm trying to help you.” Ulrik put his hands on the table, his palms open.

He had to get out, get some air. He got up, sent the chair backwards with a violent kick. It slid across the floor, clattered into the table behind him. The female officer by the door looked up, startled.

“Do whatever the hell you have to do.”

Then he strode toward the exit without looking back.