Free Call Me Princess by Sara Blædel Page A

to a heart-to-heart they’d had so far, where Louise was able to get some insight into the life that Susanne had been living until Monday night when she went out to dinner with the man who called himself Jesper Bjergholdt.
    At first Susanne didn’t respond to what Louise said, but then she kicked the toes of her shoes together.
    “I didn’t know that,” Susanne admitted with a sigh. “But she can’t understand why he hasn’t been arrested.” She glanced at Louise out the corner of her good eye. “She’s afraid he’ll come back.”
    “Are you afraid he’ll come back?” Louise asked.
    Susanne shrugged.
    “I don’t think I’m afraid... and yet... I don’t feel anything. I might also run into him on the way to work, or he could be standing there when I get home.”
    She took off her cap, set it in her lap, and shook her short hair.
    “It didn’t occur to me in the least that that night could have ended in such a disaster, and it may sound strange after all that’s happened, but I can’t really imagine it happening again, either.”
    Louise watched her as she spoke. There was naïveté and a protective shell around her that evidently had been there for many years, but at the same time she sensed that now there was also an awareness that you can’t always control what life has in store for you.
    “Maybe it’s time you took responsibility for your own life,” Louise suggested, noticing how absurd it was that Susanne had been so deeply hurt the very first time she had made an attempt to do something slightly out of the ordinary.
    “Maybe.”
    “At any rate, you ought to talk to your mother. I don’t think either of you should be talking to any more reporters,” Louise said, looking for a way to make her next point so it wouldn’t sound as harsh. “But now that the story is out, you’re going to have to resign yourself to the possibility that the fact will come out that you knew the suspect in advance and that you had been out together.”
    Susanne put her cap back on and nodded. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, either,” she said, to convince herself of that sentiment.
    “Not at all,” Louise acknowledged.
    She walked back to her office and threw the printout onto Lars’s desk.
    “Something along these lines,” Louise said, sitting down.
    He read the descriptions while he updated her on what he had found out while she was gone.
    “Karsten Flintholm was released seven months ago,” Lars began. “We’ve got both fingerprints and DNA for him, so it might be easy to match if it turns out anything is still usable from Susanne’s place. The second face she picked out is Nils Walther. He’s been out for over a year, but, as I said before, he’s never been involved in a crime of this caliber before. He’s mostly interested in things that can be converted into cash.”
    Louise pushed her chair back and propped her legs up on the edge of her desk.
    “The last guy, Søren Matthisen, is still in prison. He has another year to go for rape, so he’s out of the picture.”
    “He wasn’t on weekend release by any chance and failed to return on Monday?” Louise brainstormed.
    Lars smiled, shook his head, and said “I checked.”
    “I’ll try to get hold of Camilla.”
    She was a little afraid to hear what Susanne’s mother had told Camilla and recalled what Susanne had said. Louise recognized the feeling of irritation from the past when her own mother had been a little too controlling, but she knew it couldn’t compare. Here they were clearly dealing with a mother who had seized control over her daughter’s life. She lived right upstairs, which in and of itself was enough to make Louise cringe. A mother who was involved in controlling what her daughter did, what relationships she had, and what opinions she held. She probably also knew all the people Susanne hung out with—and there most likely wouldn’t be many of them. It must feel like living in a gigantic straitjacket.
    Poor