The Forgotten Girls Page 19

  “In fact, it sounded like there would probably be a spot for you up there if this agency doesn’t work out,” he said, letting go of the plant.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she cut in tartly. “The new agency will work out, and there’s no way I’m going to Holbæk.”

  She stopped in the hallway and thought that it was pretty darn soon for Rønholt to start airing his doubts about the new special agency. She watched Eik walk down the hall holding two small bottles of 1 percent milk and a couple of cut sandwich rolls, which he balanced on a paper plate.

  “We’re bringing it, right?” he asked, gesturing toward the food.

  Louise pulled herself together and walked with him toward the office while thinking that maybe it was quite normal to be less affected by hangovers if you kept up your state of intoxication on a regular basis.

  “Yup,” she said and picked up her bag. “Let’s get going.”

  31

  JØRGEN WAS HUNCHED over, completely focused on raking the pebbles in the courtyard as Louise and Eik pulled up in front of the white gate. He stopped in mid-motion and looked at them hesitantly. He wore a cap pulled down to his ears and wiped his hands meticulously on his blue work overalls before straightening up and folding his arms, resting them on the rake handle. He watched them carefully as they got out of the car.

  He didn’t walk down to open the gate for them, but he also didn’t react when Louise walked over and depressed the handle.

  “Hey, Jørgen—is Bodil home?” she asked before pushing the gate open.

  “Bodil,” he said, pointing toward the house.

  He dropped the rake onto the pebbles and shuffled toward the front door while Louise remained standing just inside the courtyard. Eik stayed by the car, waiting for them to be invited inside.

  Jørgen returned with Bodil, a big smile on his face.

  He was holding her hand and looked as pleased as if he had just gone inside to bring out his favorite doll.

  “Are you here about the van?” Bodil asked after they said hello. “Jørgen saw it yesterday. This time it came driving from the woods.” She tipped her head toward Avnsø Lake and the road to Starling House.

  “The white Toyota?” Eik asked, walking over to them. Jørgen eagerly headed outside to look at the black Jeep Cherokee.

  “Yes. We thought that we’d better call you,” she continued.

  “When did you see it?” Louise asked and thought about the rape that had taken place the previous morning.

  “It was around five or six, I think. We were just about to have dinner. Jørgen was hungry so we ate a little earlier than usual.”

  Bodil’s husband had walked all the way around the car and was now admiring its wide bumper.

  “He’s just crazy about cars,” Bodil smiled.

  The courtyard was peaceful, with the branches of the large chestnut tree swaying in the breeze. Louise didn’t particularly feel like bringing up what they had come there to talk about.

  “You didn’t leave the key in there, did you?” Bodil asked nervously. “Not that he knows how to drive, but he’s not always aware of his own limitations.”

  “I’ve got it right here,” Eik reassured her, waving his key ring before stuffing it back into the pocket of his black jeans.

  “Bodil, there’s something that we wanted to talk to you about,” Louise started. “Can we step inside?”

  She had brought the pictures of Lise in the bag, which she carried on her shoulder. Clouds were gathering over the treetops of the forest and the wind was picking up. It looked like it might rain soon. Louise looked at her watch. Camilla would be getting married at Roskilde City Hall in an hour and a half. Bodil pointed toward the house and asked them to go on in while she closed a window in the barn.

  Louise followed Eik, who was holding the door for her. His cheeks had picked up a bit more color, but he still looked tired and worn-out. It was kind of her fault, she thought, as she slipped past him.

  Stacks of hand-painted plates were lined up on the coffee table, and Louise admired the delicate floral motifs. Eik stayed in the hallway where the walls were lined with perfectly polished brass hunting horns all the way around the ceiling. For a moment her eyes rested on his back, his muscular shoulders underneath the black T-shirt and his narrow hips that made his pants sag.

  “Jørgen collects them,” Bodil told her as she walked into the living room. “He finds the flowers that he wants and then I paint a plate for him. But we try to avoid duplicates so last night we were going through all of the ones we already have.”

  She smiled and asked if they wanted coffee.

  “No, thanks,” Eik said quickly from the hallway, and Louise guessed that he would prefer to get this visit over with soon.

  “I would, please,” she said, catching his eye.

  Eik shook his head at her before pointing to the hunting horns and asking Bodil where they came from.

  “My father used to hunt,” she smiled. “He had a large hunting lodge up by Jægerspris and the way I remember it, he would be gone from the first day of hunting season until it ended. I’m sure that’s not quite true; he was just rarely home because he worked so much. But he was always in the best mood when he left the house with his rifles.” Her smile turned a little sad. She asked them to come into the kitchen with her and got out two coffee cups.

  “Would you prefer tea?” she asked, looking at Eik while pointing to a box of tea bags.

  He put up his hands and politely declined.

  “What did you want to talk about?” Bodil went on while putting on the kettle and bringing out instant coffee and a couple of spoons.

  Louise brought out the picture of Lise from her bag. “The last time we were here, we asked if you had seen this woman.” She held out the photo.

  Bodil accepted it and walked over to the window, studying it for a second before returning to the table and putting it down.

  “I don’t recall seeing her,” she said and went to get the kettle of boiling water. “Do you take milk?”

  Louise shook her head. “I’ve been told that you were the director at Eliselund until shortly before the old institution closed down,” she continued, watching as Bodil raised her eyebrows in surprise and then nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right; I worked down there from 1973 until 1980.”

  “Lise Andersen and her sister, Mette, grew up at the institution and lived there during that period,” Eik offered, pulling out a chair when Bodil returned to the table to sit down.

  “The twins.” Bodil reached for the picture to look at it again.

  For a minute she seemed lost in her own thoughts while regarding Lise’s face. Then she looked at Louise and hesitated briefly before speaking.

  “I do remember the twin sisters. Back then, all of our residents had numbers. Theirs were fifty-one and fifty-two. But they both died.”

  “Were you at work the day they died?” Louise asked.

  Bodil was still staring straight ahead until she slowly started shaking her head. “It happened the day before I left Eliselund,” she began. “It’s been so long that I barely remember the course of events. I believe the girls were admitted to the sick ward a few days earlier. They both had a high fever and had already been bedridden for a couple of days.”

  “What happened on the day they died?” Louise asked. Bodil looked at the door as Jørgen called her from the hallway.

  “Excuse me,” she said, getting up to go talk to him. A minute later she returned with two yellow roses, which she held out for Louise. “He picked these for you.”

  Louise thanked her and put the flowers down on the table, asking Bodil once again to tell them what happened on the day that Lisemette disappeared from the sick ward.

  “I was packing up my things,” she said hesitantly, as if the memory had to be brought out from the very back of her mind. She told them that she had lived in a small director’s apartment in the main building, which she needed to pack up to get ready for
the movers, who were coming to pick up her belongings the following morning. “When I left the place the next day, they were flying the flag at half-mast. They must have died the previous evening, or perhaps it happened overnight. I don’t recall.”

  “There was a consultant doctor there back then,” Louise continued. “He was the one who signed the death certificates. What do you know about him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “We know that,” Louise quickly cut in. “But to me, it sounds implausible that two sisters should die just one minute apart. You were there when it happened. How is something like that possible?”

  Bodil folded her hands in front of her and looked down at the table before turning her eyes toward Louise.

  “We had several unfortunate incidents with that doctor,” she finally said, clearing her throat. “Perhaps what really happened was that one of them died some time before the other one, and he was the one who neglected to get the paperwork done and then later entered both of them at the same time. I can’t say.”

  Bodil sat for a moment as if considering how much she could tell them.

  “There were more errors back then. Today you would call it medical malpractice and it would be reported to the National Agency for Patients’ Rights and Complaints, but…” She sighed heavily. “Back then, the public didn’t give the same attention to homes for the mentally deficient—and certainly not in those cases where the patients had no next of kin. So medical errors were easy to hide with a death certificate.”

  “But she didn’t die,” Louise said.

  “The consultant doctor hung himself, and there was probably a good reason for that,” Bodil said. She apologized for being unable to answer Louise’s questions.

  Deeply frustrated, Louise finished her instant coffee and exhaled loudly. She was preparing to leave when Eik asked whether Bodil had always cared for Jørgen herself.

  She nodded briefly. “Luckily, I’ve been able to.”

  Louise got up, and Eik got the message. Bodil walked with them to the courtyard. When they reached the car, they saw Jørgen sitting behind the wheel, looking focused as if he were driving.

  “We need to clear up what happened in the sick ward at Eliselund on February twenty-seven, 1980,” Louise said as she was standing one-on-one with Bodil. “We have to find the other twin. Do you remember anyone who used to work down there back then?”

  “It’s been thirty years,” Bodil reminded her. “And I’m not good with names.”

  “What about Lillian; do you know her?”

  “Lillian…” Bodil repeated reflectively. “We had a couple of student nurses. I guess she might have been one of them.”

  She shuddered slightly before looking up at Louise with a small, apologetic smile. “The end of my time at Eliselund wasn’t the best,” she admitted. “I wasn’t really in touch with my coworkers. They thought I was too tough, and they were opposed to our continued practice of tying down those residents who were unable to feed themselves so that we could feed them without any trouble. Back then, we cut up their sandwiches into small bites in a bowl, and then we poured tea over it to make it easy to mix with a spoon. It turned into a terrible mess if they were too unsettled.”

  She shook her head a little.

  “A few staff members also objected to the fact that the employees ate a more varied diet than the residents but I never took to that, because the sandwiches that we mixed in with their tea had liver pâté and salami as well as herring.”

  “Not all three at the same time, I hope?” Louise said.

  Bodil looked at her uncomprehendingly; then she nodded. “Yes. They were supposed to eat both fish and meat, and they did. But toward the end it seemed like more and more conflicts arose between us, and so I chose to put in my resignation.”

  Bodil took Jørgen’s hand when he got out of the car. As Louise was backing out, she noticed in her side-view mirror how the old couple walked back to the house hand in hand.

  The tenderness was lovely, but Louise suspected their relationship wasn’t always that uncomplicated. They never were, she thought.

  32

  MIK CALLED JUST as Eik had rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. Louise pulled over in front of the entrance to the old sawmill.

  “I have to ask you for a favor,” he started off. “We can’t get Bitten Gamst to cough up the name of her lover but we need to get ahold of him to find out if he saw the rapist in or around the house when he came to visit her.”

  “So you want me to give it another try?” Louise asked.

  “We also need to get her husband to talk and tell us if he knows who drives the white van,” he continued. He added that a couple of his people had caught René that same morning walking around the woods with a loaded shotgun. “Of course he denied looking for the rapist but I don’t want him roaming around out there. And I feel certain that he and his wife are covering for someone who frequents the woods.”

  “Did the forensic officers get anything out of searching the scene?”

  “There were some pretty nice footprints by the door. Right now we’re working on sorting out which fingerprints belong to the people who usually visit the house so we can exclude them.”

  “You’re not going to exclude them just like that?” Louise blurted out.

  “No, of course not.” Mik told her that Bitten and her husband didn’t appear to have much of a social life. “It’s limited to her mother and two other couples. Those are the only people who have been to the house in the past month.”

  “And her lover,” Louise added. She promised to see what she could get out of them.

  “TA-DAH!” CAMILLA EXULTED when she called back a minute later. “You may now call me Mrs. Sachs-Smith.”

  “Congratulations,” Louise said, holding the phone away from her ear a little. “That’s wonderful news. Listen, I want to hear everything, but I’m in the middle of something serious here. I promise to call as soon as I’m done. Enjoy each other—I’m so happy for you.”

  “We can go by there on our way home and have a toast with them,” Eik suggested, looking quite serious.

  Louise quickly shook her head. “I don’t think they’re at all interested in having company. It seems like they’ve got more than enough in each other,” she said. “And I was actually going to ask if you would mind stopping by my parents’ house and picking up Jonas after we talk to Bitten.”

  Louise had given a lot of thought to her meeting with René at the hospital. If he didn’t recognize her when they saw each other in the doorway, he had bigger things on his mind. But now that he had had some time to think, something might start to ring a bell. Of course, he might well have known exactly who she was. The whole thing was unsettling, but she’d decided that she would have to ignore whatever may come. That idea had felt sensible then, but now that they were approaching the Starling House, her chest started tightening.

  She turned Eik’s massive vehicle into the narrow driveway to the thatched house and pulled the emergency brake.

  “Does this thing work?” she asked worriedly as the car rolled forward a little.

  “It’s not razor-sharp but it works.” He spit out his chewing gum in the tall grass as he got out.

  Every door and window of the house was closed; the place was completely quiet, and there was no sign of life. Aside from a car parked right by the road, there was no indication that anybody was home.

  They walked together along the uneven stone path to the door at the end of the old forest guard’s house. The small-paned windows were lined up close together all the way along the side of the old farmhouse. Hollyhocks climbed up the white, lime-washed timber frame, their top flowers bending down like swans when they reached the bottom edge of the thatched roof.

  Louise walked over and knocked on a low stable door, which seemed to be the original one, still on the house. It was so low that she would risk bumping her head walking through. On the opposite end of the house was the patio where the hot tub was set up. It
faced the closed-off part of the property; a dense thicket of beech marked the division between yard and forest. There was no sign of the forensic officers, who had long finished in the house, except for a small piece of barrier tape used for preventing passage through the area around the patio door.

  Louise didn’t hear anyone coming until the door opened, and she instinctively took a step back when she saw Bitten. The slight woman had a large, bluish-black mark around one eye, which was completely swollen shut. She wore a white robe, and her hair was rumpled and flat on one side as if she had lain down with it still wet.

  “Are you alone?” Louise asked while Eik stayed in the background.

  Bitten shook her head a little. “Come in.”

  “How are you doing?” Louise asked, leaving the door open for Eik while she followed Bitten into the living room, which had been renovated with a floor made from ship’s planks—a remarkably poor decorating choice for the old house. All in all, René and Bitten had a nautical theme going on with both furniture and paintings in shades of blue and green. At one end of the living room, a large, built-in aquarium ran all the way behind the sofa set to the patio door. At least the style was consistent, Louise thought, but it seemed completely out of place in the middle of the forest. There was neither sea nor a harbor nearby. The closest thing to a body of water was Avnsø Lake.

  “I’m okay,” Bitten answered, her voice like that of a little girl. Louise had enough experience to register that what was missing from her voice was her dignity.

  “Where’s your husband?”

  Louise followed Bitten’s gaze out into the yard. “He’s putting a cross on the dog’s grave.” Bitten sank onto the wide couch, her eyes shiny. “Our daughter insisted.”

  Mik had told them that they had found the dog in the yard next to the toolshed, its neck broken and upper body crushed. “It wasn’t a pretty sight,” he had added.

  “My daughter and I didn’t get to see her, so we haven’t even had a chance to say good-bye,” she sniffled. “René buried her this morning and now there’s going to be a cross on there.”