Call Me Princess by Sara Blædel Page B

the same perpetrator. So I’ve come to see if I could get you to provide a few more details, even though we went through all of this back then.”
    Karin finally turned around and looked right at her.
    “Do you think you’re up to talking about it?” Louise hurriedly asked when she saw the blank look in Karin’s eyes. Not that that would make it any better if Karin’s answer were no, but Louise didn’t want to push her too hard.
    Karin nodded and shrugged her shoulders. “Of course. If I can help.”
    She walked over to the table and gathered the plates and glasses onto a tray, brought them back to the kitchen, and started washing the dishes. Without uttering a word.
    Louise took a deep breath. “How’s work going?”
    Karin had been working at a daycare when they last spoke, the lead teacher in her classroom. She was a slender woman, thirty-one years old. A woman who had seemed fully committed to whatever she was involved in. While taking her statement, the police learned she had been raising her daughter alone since the little girl was almost two; and between work and her child, it was nearly impossible to find time to date. She had decided to look for a boyfriend online in the hopes of making a family again.
    “I’m not working anymore,” Karin said in a monotone as she pulled out a kitchen towel and started drying the dishes.
    Louise was starting to get an uncomfortable sense of what had happened during the two intervening years, or perhaps more accurately what hadn’t happened. It had struck her the instant she stepped into the living room: there was something stagnant about the place. A stack of magazines lay under the coffee table, but there was no energy in the room, no spark, no spirit. Just emptiness, like a vacation home that had been closed up—and yet there were two people spending their days here.
    They sat opposite each other around the coffee table. Louise had her notepad ready, and she scrutinized Karin, trying to determine what was going on inside her shut-down exterior. How was she responding to being contacted by the police again? Was she hoping that Kim Jensen would finally be caught, or was she indifferent after all this time?
    “I want to ask you to think back and try to describe Kim Jensen’s physical appearance for me in as much detail as you can. In the police report you said that he didn’t have any particularly distinguishing features, but try your best to describe what he looked like.”
    Karin sat there, staring at the coffee table. “The whole time since it happened, I’ve been trying to erase him from my memory. I’ve closed my eyes many times and imagined his face being swallowed by flames, but it never worked. His eyes keep burning into me. They follow me everywhere, watching everything I do.”
    She spoke softly, slowly, as if it took a great deal of effort to choose her words. “He had dark brown hair, short, slightly wavy, sort of a little combed back.” She closed her eyes and sat there in silence for a moment. “He had really pretty eyes, greenish brown, and heavy, dark eyebrows. He had soft, full lips. Not really big lips, but they were unusual. If he’d been a woman, I think you would say he had a sensual mouth. Do people say that about men too?”
    A shiver ran down Louise’s spine. Karin’s voice had suddenly changed. There was a passionate warmth to her words, one that shouldn’t be there because she was describing the man who had practically murdered her.
    Sick , Louise thought, she must be sick. Something was very wrong. The woman across from her was drowning, and it didn’t seem like anyone was doing anything about it. To the contrary, it seemed like a process that was calmly, quietly succeeding.
    “Six-foot-one and what people online call an average build.” Karin made a little face at the impersonal description.
    “Was he dark-skinned?” Louise asked, interrupting Karin’s steady stream of words.
    Karin looked surprised and shook her head.