The Night Women by Sara Blaedel

Author:Sara Blaedel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

27

Louise propped her bike up against the outside wall of the church. Swinging her bag over her shoulder, she unbuckled her helmet and strode toward Camilla’s silver-gray VW Polo, its hatchback door wide open and the driver’s-side door ajar. She figured Camilla must be bringing things in, and she decided to help out by carrying something when she walked over to the church.

The back was empty, so she shut the door and checked the back seat before carefully removing the wreath from the passenger-side door and pushing the driver-side door shut with her elbow.

The flag wasn’t at half-mast yet, but there was still a little over an hour until the funeral. Louise knew that Mikkelsen was planning to come. He still seemed genuinely shaken up as though he’d lost a family member, Louise thought, but he hadn’t chastised Camilla for her article even once. To the contrary, he said that he ought to have talked to Kaj right away, that maybe he could have prevented the tragedy that way. And he had reminded Willumsen again that you couldn’t blame people who weren’t familiar with the world of prostitution if they broke some of the unwritten rules that people lived by in this part of town.

The scent of flowers filled Louise’s nose as she made her way across the gravel courtyard. Louise saw the open door to the church and when she spotted the bucket filled with small bouquets outside, she assumed Camilla was already hard at work.

It took a second before she reacted to the voice and looked over toward the pastor’s residence, where a heavy silhouette was squatting down over something that was lying on the stoop in front of the pastor’s kitchen door. Louise recognized the blond hair right away and dropped the wreath and started running.

The man stood up and seemed a little confused as he pointed down at Camilla and explained, practically tripping over his words, that his name was Otto Birch and he was the sexton.

“She was lying here like this when we arrived a couple minutes ago,” he said. “She’s crying and mumbling something about ‘dead,’ but she won’t really respond,” he said.

“Did something happen to her?” Louise thought of the brutality involved in Kaj Antonsen’s death. “Is she bleeding? Does it look like someone hit her?”

Louise leaned over her friend and brushed her hair out of her face, which was frozen in an expression of stubborn denial, like you might see in a toddler throwing a tantrum.

Camilla’s sobs were throaty and sounded more like a constant moan interrupted by muddled speech, from which Louise could only pick out a few words like “dead,” “funeral,” “baby,” and “church.”

Louise took hold of her friend and tried to get her to sit up. She studied Camilla’s face and ran a hand through her blond hair to check and see if there were any signs of physical trauma.

“She’s in shock,” Otto said, trying to light a cigar.

The pastor was walking over from the parking lot, and when he spotted them he sped up.

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