Copenhagen Noir - Bo Tao Michaelis [92]
“She doesn’t look like this now, I assume?”
“No, I just wanted to … Here!” He handed me a much more recent photo of an adult Heidi. I recognized her look and smile, but her hair was cut very short and bleached in blond streaks.
“So what’s the story?”
He gave me the short version. After returning home from Copenhagen, things had gone well for her. She studied to be a physical therapist, got a full-time job, married a colleague, and after seven years of marriage without children, she got a divorce. “Her name was Lorentzen when she was married, but she took her maiden name back after the divorce.”
“And what brings you here today?”
His gaze wavered. “It sounds almost like a bad remake of some film, but … she’s back in Copenhagen. She’s been there for fourteen days, and she doesn’t answer her phone. We don’t know where she’s staying, either. I … her mother is very worried.”
“But she’s an adult now.” I made a quick calculation. “Close to forty, if I’m not mistaken.”
“So what?” He seemed aggravated. “Your children are your children, all their lives.”
“And you won’t go down and try to find her yourself?”
“No. It’s impossible. She blames us for everything that’s gone wrong.”
“Everything that’s gone wrong? You’ve just described a more or less normal life.”
“Yes, well, except that we forced her to come home back then. She has never been able to forgive us for that.”
“The young man she was staying with down there … did she ever hear from him again?”
He scrunched his lips together. “We don’t know. But … we found this, among her papers, after she moved back in with us following her divorce. A small apartment in the basement. We can come and go …”
I realized he was trying to make excuses as best he could, and I held out my hand. He gave me a tourist postcard, conventional, with a photo of Tivoli on the front. I turned it over. There wasn’t much written: I’ll meet you here, as planned. If problems, call this number. Your Christian. Below it he had written a telephone number that began with 45, the country code for Denmark.
I looked at the more recent photo again. “Christian—and a phone number. Have you tried calling him?”
“Yes, but he said I must have the wrong number.”
“I see.”
“And we don’t have the strength for it. I want you to go to Copenhagen and see this man, Veum. We want to know what has happened to our daughter. Why she doesn’t answer us …”
I took the job, got on the Internet, and reserved a plane ticket for the next day. Meanwhile, I searched for the name and number and found what I was after: Christian Mogensen, with an address on Wesselsgade, which according to my well-worn map of Copenhagen lay right next to Sortedams Sø, one of the city’s lakes.
I thought about calling him before I left Bergen but decided that it would probably be more effective to wait until I was a short taxi ride from where he lived.
It worked. The man who answered the phone sounded flustered when I introduced myself as a private investigator from Bergen, but he admitted that he was indeed Christian Mogensen and that he had sent a card to an old girlfriend in Bergen. I said that if he didn’t provide information that would lead me to Heidi Davik, I would be at his door like some crazy Viking faster than he could say “three mackerels.”
He hesitated a few seconds, but when I added “or like a bulldog gone berserk,” he gave me an address on Lille Istedgade and said that’s where I would find her, if she was at home.
“Lille Istedgade?” I said, and he took my tone of voice in such a way that he quickly added, “Yes, but Istedgade isn’t like it used to be.”
“No?”
“Not at all.”
In many ways he was right. True, the street still had a porno shop or two, and a few of the girls strolling the sidewalk in what seemed to be a casual