The Forgotten Girls Read online

  This was long before cell phones so their dad had run to the nearest farm to call for help, and as Louise lay wedged on the floor of the car, she had heard the screams: loud and filled with pain and shock. She never found out how many people had been in the crashed car or whether they all survived. But her brief glimpse of the wreck had stuck with her.

  “Did he stand you up?” Eik asked while he fiddled with the two worn strings around his right wrist. One yellow and one green.

  “You seem to know these roads so well, considering how long it’s been since you were here,” Eik continued, seemingly intent upon pushing her to open up.

  Louise visibly tightened but didn’t answer him. She continued straight instead of getting on the freeway ramp.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m going to Roskilde,” Louise said, assuming that he had sobered up enough to drive by now. “That way I can still keep my appointment.”

  “So where do you want to get out?”

  “It really doesn’t matter,” Louise replied and meant it. “How about right here?” She started to pull over.

  “No, stop it. Just drive to your appointment and then I’ll take over from there,” he argued, waving her back onto the road.

  Louise turned and looked at him.

  “Then I’m going to need you to shut up,” she said. “Because otherwise, frankly, I’d rather walk.”

  “Okay. Calm down.” He put his hands up disarmingly and cocked his head a little so his long bangs slipped down over his nose. “I will.”

  Louise turned back out on the road with a tense smile, practically fuming with irritation.

  THE IMPRESSIVE ESTATE that had become Camilla’s new home was majestic and beautiful, with windows as tall as French doors. A wide stone staircase led down from the front door with elegant pots of flowers on both sides. The courtyard in front of the house had a round lawn with a small fountain in the middle, and everything was covered with small pebbles, which crunched under the tires as Louise pulled up by the front door.

  She noticed the unimpressed look in Eik’s eyes as he glanced up at the house while getting the pack of cigarettes out of his pocket once again. Smoking wasn’t permitted in any of the department’s vehicles, but after she got out he jumped behind the wheel, rolled down the window, and flouted the rule.

  “See you tomorrow,” he said and gave her a quick nod before he turned the car around and drove off.

  8

  WHAT WAS THAT about the kids you guys found?” asked Camilla, who hadn’t seemed overly surprised when her friend showed up after all.

  “The girl was just playing as if nothing had happened,” Louise told her. “First we heard the little boy, completely beside himself and dissolved in tears, and then we found the others.” She shook her head a little. “I wonder how long they’d been left to themselves,” she mumbled. She was having a hard time getting the children out of her head. They had been so close when the woman was beaten and killed.

  “Heineken,” she answered when Camilla asked what she would like to drink and listed off her options. She would not have minded a cigarette, to be honest, if it weren’t for the fact that she had quit long ago. Besides, she had been inhaling Eik’s secondhand smoke all day. She wasn’t sure if this was due to seeing Mik again or the encounter with Ole Thomsen. Maybe it was just because the day had been so crappy from start to finish, she thought. It seemed like days had passed since she had picked up Eik Nordstrøm at the bar in Sydhavnen.

  “I saw Big Thomsen today,” she said after Camilla opened her beer. “Do you remember him?”

  Camilla shook her head without taking the time to think, but then again she had always been better at putting things behind her than Louise had. “I have no idea who that is.” She put a glass on the table.

  “Yes, you do,” Louise insisted and started laughing. “You slept with him!”

  “I did?” her friend asked, surprised. From the look on her face, the discussion didn’t seem to be ringing any bells.

  “That time when you visited me in Hvalsø for the Whitsun celebration,” Louise reminded her. “At the very least, you went home with him.”

  When they’d first met each other, Camilla lived in Roskilde, too, and it had been difficult to convince her to come to Hvalsø even though the two towns were only one train stop apart.

  “Well, I don’t remember any of that,” her friend insisted.

  “Back then he had an apartment in the basement of his parents’ house with a corner bar and a big stereo. His dad was the chief of police in Roskilde. You remember him; you just don’t want to.”

  “Wait,” Camilla said, her eyes moving back and forth as she seemed to shift the pieces in her head. “Oh, that guy! How’s he doing?” she asked, her attention obviously elsewhere. Then she looked out the window and excused herself. “You’ll have to keep yourself entertained for a minute. I think the workers are about to leave even though we had a deal that they were going to keep at it until they finished the back room.”

  Louise was left to drink her beer alone. Through the open doors, she could hear her friend having a loud discussion with someone. She returned to the kitchen soon after, her eyes dark with anger.

  “I told him that they don’t need to bother coming back,” she groaned. “They’re not finished even though they promised, and they have the nerve to just pick up and go.”

  She banged the table angrily with her hand. “It’s Lars Hemmingsen—do you know him? Didn’t he used to hang out with Ole Thomsen and those guys back then?”

  Louise didn’t remember him off the top of her head, but Ole Thomsen did always have a group of followers.

  “They’ll get it done,” Louise soothed, not sure why this all came as a surprise to Camilla. Everyone knew that contractors never finished on time.

  “The painters are coming tomorrow,” her friend added indignantly. “But I guess there’s no point now since those bastards didn’t finish plastering the walls. And you know what?”

  Louise dutifully shook her head and listened.

  “That Hemmingsen guy asked if we could pay them under the table!”

  “Oh?” Louise asked, confused.

  “But Frederik said he wanted an invoice. Obviously that’s why they’re dragging it out—so they can charge us for more hours.”

  Camilla had decided to have the wedding at home. She wanted to hold the ceremony in the park behind the house where the grounds sloped down toward Roskilde Fjord; the reception would be inside in the spacious rooms. From what Louise had gathered, Frederik would prefer to have the ceremony at Roskilde Cathedral and then celebrate with a nice dinner at a restaurant, but Camilla refused.

  “I ran into Mik out by Avnsø Lake,” Louise said and poured the rest of the beer into her glass. “It was kind of weird seeing him again.”

  “What was he doing out there?”

  “He’s head of the investigation.”

  “The investigation of what?”

  “The homicide of the woman.”

  Camilla wasn’t listening at all. If this had been in her old days as a journalist, she would have gobbled up every detail, pressing for more.

  “Was he doing okay?”

  Camilla stood by the window, her back turned, watching the workers load their equipment into their vehicles.

  Louise shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

  “You were so stupid to screw that up,” Camilla scolded and turned toward her. “Things could have worked out really well for the two of you.”

  Once again she turned her attention to the workers. Louise emptied her glass in one long swallow to avoid having to reply and stood up, annoyed. Camilla was in a whole other world, and she didn’t have the energy to be part of it.

  Just then the door opened and Markus walked in, closely followed by two friends. “Mom, can we go to the movies?” he asked. “And can you give us a ride?”

  Camilla said a quick hello to her son’s friends and nodded. “As long as you don’t hav
e any homework.”

  Only then did Markus notice Louise, and he walked over and gave her a hug. It was quicker than they used to be, she noted, remembering that he would be turning fourteen on his next birthday. So perhaps it wasn’t so strange, especially with his friends watching.

  Louise had not seen much of Camilla’s son since he changed schools, and even though Jonas and Markus had been friends since the first grade, and promised each other to keep in touch, Jonas had only been to visit him once. Luckily, Markus appeared to have settled in well in his new class.

  “Can you drop me off at the station?” Louise asked. She got out the bag of decorations from the craft store and put it on the table. She had no idea why Camilla wanted to mess around with making the invitations herself when she had the entire bottom floor to remodel.

  “Did you make any plans with Mik then?” Camilla asked as they sat in the car, the boys making a racket in the back.

  “He was in the middle of a homicide investigation,” Louise repeated. “The woman’s body was still there. To be honest, we didn’t talk much.”

  “But now you have a reason to call him,” her friend went on, oblivious to her feelings. “You know, there’s nothing like some good sex to lift your spirits.”

  “Please stop,” Louise pleaded, picking up her bag from the floor so she would be ready to jump out in front of the station.

  “Take care.”

  She gave Camilla a quick peck on the cheek before she got out and waved to the boys from the sidewalk.

  WHEN LOUISE GOT home, Jonas was in his room, playing the guitar. She could hear the music through his closed door, and after taking off her shoes and saying hi to Dina she walked over and knocked to let him know that she was home.

  “Hey,” he said, looking up.

  “Do we know if Melvin’s having dinner with us tonight?” she asked. She hadn’t had a chance to call their downstairs neighbor as she’d said she would. On weekdays they ate together if neither of them had other plans. The deal was that they would take turns preparing the meal, but in reality Melvin did most of the cooking.

  “He’s with Grete. They were going to her friend’s place by the community garden in Dragør. He said we could come along if we want.”

  “I really don’t feel like it,” Louise burst out.

  Over the past few months Melvin had been seeing Grete Milling quite often. The two of them had met while Louise was investigating the disappearance of Grete’s grown-up daughter in the Costa del Sol. Her daughter had been murdered, but the two retirees had subsequently stayed in touch, and Louise was pleased that they were enjoying each other’s company. It eased her guilty conscience a little on those occasions when she lacked the energy to be social.

  “Fine by me,” Jonas said. “I’d rather finish this one anyway so I can put it up on YouTube.”

  Her birthday present to her son had been a software program that allowed him to upload his original music to his computer and put together his own mixes. He spent several hours every day writing and editing, which was just fine by Louise. She was glad that her teenager was not zoning out in front of video games full of mindless violence or spending entire evenings commenting on his friends’ status updates on Facebook.

  “Should we just have sandwiches or do you want me to go to the store?” she asked on her way to the kitchen.

  “Sandwiches,” Jonas answered from his room, where he was once again bent over his guitar.

  9

  GOOD MORNING,” Eik greeted Louise as she stopped in the doorway to their office just before 8 a.m. He had his feet on the desk, her large tea mug full of black coffee in his hand, and the morning paper in his lap.

  He was wearing black again. Louise figured it was probably just his standard wardrobe.

  “Good morning,” she mumbled and put her bag down on the floor next to the desk.

  “You want some?” he asked, pushing a bakery bag toward her.

  Louise shook her head. “No thanks, but I would like my tea mug.”

  He looked at her with obvious confusion until she pointed to his coffee.

  “Oh,” he said. “There weren’t any thermoses out there so I just grabbed the one that would hold the most. You can have it when I’m done, okay?”

  She sighed and went to fill her electric kettle and find a mug.

  “The woman was a child care provider, just thirty-four years old,” Eik went on with a gesture toward the paper. “But other than that, your friend up there in Holbæk isn’t letting much out of the bag. Did he put a lid on it, or what’s going on?”

  Louise shrugged. “I have no idea. I didn’t talk to them,” she answered. She was annoyed that she had only been able to find a small white cafeteria cup for her tea. “Can’t we just stay focused on the one we need to identify?”

  Eik nodded. He folded the paper and tossed it on the floor.

  “She’s not showing up on the Danish lists of missing persons, so how about searching the international records? See if there’s been any description through the years that matches the scar on her face?” Louise asked, secretly pleased that he couldn’t reach his computer without taking his feet off the desk.

  “Which time period are we looking at?” he replied, moving Louise’s mug to the window next to his dirty cup from the day before.

  If this is a woman who went into hiding, we’ll start by going back twenty years, she decided. “Start by searching for women born between 1960 and 1975, and see who’s been reported missing in that age group since 1990.”

  Louise recalled the smooth skin on the uninjured side of the woman’s face and her almost childlike expression and briefly wondered if perhaps the woman was actually younger.

  It was quiet in the office while Eik logged on to Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon.

  “I sent them the picture yesterday,” he said after a little while, “and I think they would have reacted to her distinctive scar if she’d been in their register. But I’ll look through the list myself now.”

  “Good.” Louise didn’t have enough experience in the new department to know whether Interpol headquarters would notify them if there was a match in the international register of missing persons.

  She opened up the national register and entered “1990” in the search field. She pulled up a list of reports and cancellations. The names were still listed in the register even if they had turned up again or been reported as deceased, in which case a cancellation code had been added.

  She entered the year of birth in the advanced search field and checked the box on the right to indicate female.

  The first case that caught her eye was a woman born in 1964 who went missing on March 3, 1990. But reading farther down on the page, Louise saw that the case had a black marker: The woman had been found dead four months later. The next photograph she focused on was of a small, stocky woman with long, dark hair like a tangled halo around her head. The woman was from Kolding and shared certain similarities with the deceased, but she did not have a scar.

  Louise figured it might be possible that the woman had been reported missing and then subsequently been in an accident, so that the scar wouldn’t be mentioned in the report. But Flemming had said it was an old injury, she reminded herself; she dismissed the Kolding case.

  Lower down on the page, her eyes lingered on the town name of Hvalsø. Louise leaned forward and activated the case from 1991. It had been neither canceled nor affixed with a black marker, so the girl had never been found.

  She stared at the name for a little while, her eyes squinting, and realization began to dawn. She remembered the case, even though she had moved away from the town by then. Lotte Svendsen was the girl’s name, and she had been twenty-three years old when she went missing. She had been a few grades ahead of Louise, who had only recognized her from her picture.

  Lotte Svendsen had been reported missing in connection with the town’s annual Whitsun celebration. It was the night between Saturday and Sunday when there had been a party at the spor
ts center. Louise suddenly realized that she had never cared to know how the case turned out. Those were the years when she had put Hvalsø behind her. So the girl never turned back up.

  But Lotte Svendsen fit the description of their Jane Doe in no way. The next couple of women in the age group had all been found and canceled in the system. And then there was one more that same year, but Louise quickly determined that she was not the woman they were looking for, as she was tall and fair. She only dwelled on the case because this one had never been closed, either. The woman was nineteen and had been living with her parents in Espergærde. She had disappeared while visiting a friend who went to boarding school in Ny Tolstrup.

  This case was one Louise had never heard of, probably because she had spent so little time at her parents’ place in the years after she left town.

  The cases had long been deleted from the electronic system and were now only stored in the basic archive, which didn’t hold much information. All she found was that the second case had been placed with the old Search Department three weeks after the young woman’s disappearance. Back then it had also been noted that there might be a connection to the missing person case from Hvalsø. The two towns were only about five miles apart, and both places bordered on the woods in which the girls, according to witness statements, had disappeared. Otherwise, there were no links between the two girls, and the lead was a dead end.

  HANNE OPENED THE door without knocking to remind them of the department meeting at ten.

  “Did you put the cake in the kitchen?” she asked, looking at Louise.

  “The cake?” Louise answered, puzzled.

  “Yeah—we take turns bringing cake,” Hanne said. “Did you think it turned up by itself?”

  Louise had only attended the weekly department meeting once and had given no thought at all to how the snacks ended up on the table. “No, I didn’t realize it was my turn.”