Extract from Sara Blædel

Call me Princess

Translated by John Mason. 

(p. 9-11)

There was a click as she pressed the door opener, and the next moment the glass door swung open onto the ward. She walked with rapid paces, her gaze fixed to the floor. From the corners of her eyes she sensed the visitors and next-of-kin sitting there talking softly. A laboratory technician wheeled a trolley with blood samples out of one of the examination rooms, and it was only by the skin of her teeth that she avoided a collision.

She apologized without stopping and hurried on towards reception. She swung round the corner past the glass cubicle and entered the staff room.
“Louise Rick from Section A,” she said, introducing herself. “Who should I talk to?”
A young nurse stood up and smiled at her.
“Just a moment. I’ll call the doctor. Do have a seat while you wait.”
She pointed towards the white oval table, where cake crumbs and brown rings left by used cups spoke of afternoon coffee.

Louise removed her sunglasses from her dark hair and placed them on the table, as her eyes followed the nurse, who went out into the front office to make the call. Then she folded her hands behind her neck and breathed out heavily. She had driven aggressively, pushing through the afternoon traffic out along Kalvebod Brygge and Folehaven, on several occasions hammering her fist on the wheel when the queue came to a standstill. It had taken an unusually long time to drive the ten kilometres from Police Headquarters in Copenhagen out to Hvidovre hospital.

It had been just before five o’clock when the head of the homicide squad, Hans Suhr, had entered her office. She had been in the process of writing a list of things she had to buy on the way home, but when she saw the expression in his eyes, she pushed the pad away. She would ring Peter to ask him to take over the shopping. He had suggested it himself that morning when he drove her to work, but then she had optimistically brushed away the idea and said she could easily manage to do it.
“There’s been a rape that I want you to drive out and deal with.”
The homicide chief had sat down on the hard wooden chair at one end of her desk.

Before he got any further, Louse pulled the block towards her again and tore off the shopping list. Suhr often involved her in rape cases. Victims had the right to be interviewed by a woman, and since there were few of them in the department, such cases fell to her as a rule.
“She’s been taken to Hvidovre,” he said when she was ready, her biro poised over the paper.
“It’s a 32-year-old woman from Valby. Her mother, who lives on the floor above, came down to the daughter’s flat at around lunchtime and found her in the bedroom, gagged and with her hands tied behind her back. There was blood in the bed and the daughter was so exhausted she was almost unconscious.”

The homicide chief seemed to be considering whether there was more he should add.
“The mother removed the gaffa tape from her mouth before she called the ambulance,” he went on.

Louise studied him as he talked in order to prepare herself, to predict how bad it was, whatever lay ahead. The fact that the victim had been bound and gagged was enough for City Station to have contacted Section A, and the state the victim was in put the rape in a class of particularly violent assaults.