The Forgotten Girls Page 9

  “Are you nuts? They’re way too young,” her friend dismissed. “They’re barely teenagers.”

  Louise laughed. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Isn’t that usually when they start doing things like that?”

  “I don’t think ‘usually’ plays much of a part when you’re that age,” Melvin chipped in, sneaking another half rissole onto his plate. “The whole smoking and drinking thing seems like it just starts when you’re ready. I was twelve when I lit up my first cigarette.”

  “Well, that makes you an excellent role model then,” Louise said, hoping that her neighbor hadn’t been entertaining Jonas with too many stories of his youth.

  “HOW’S THE REMODELING coming along?” Louise asked once they had cleared the table and were having coffee. Before Melvin went back downstairs, he had left a handful of Quality Street chocolates on the table and extended an invitation from Grete Milling to Louise and Jonas to come along to Dragør that Sunday.

  Camilla shrugged and grabbed a piece of chocolate.

  “Frederik wasn’t exactly happy to hear that I’d fired the workers. He’d prefer everything to run smoothly of course, but I’m simply not going to put up with people blowing off a deal,” she huffed. “Just because they think they’ve got you cornered and you need the job finished no matter how they behave.”

  “Have you found someone else to take over?”

  Camilla shook her head.

  “The ones we talked to have an eight-week waiting list—minimum.”

  “So I guess you’ll have to rehire the other ones so they can finish,” Louise said with a small smile.

  “Are you crazy? No way! I won’t let them set foot in my house again,” Camilla sputtered. “If we can’t find anyone else to do the work, I’ll put up a tent in the yard. Or hire some Polacks. They don’t spend half their working hours reading the paper and drinking Coke, either.”

  Louise couldn’t help but laugh. “That’ll look great on the front page when it’s revealed that the Sachs-Smith family uses underpaid labor.”

  “We don’t have to underpay them just because they’re foreigners,” her friend snapped irritably. Then she cracked a smile herself when she said that she was actually considering overpaying them.

  She picked out another chocolate wrapped in glittery red foil.

  “But it’s all a mess,” she admitted, folding the foil into a tiny square. “The contractor—the guy from Hvalsø—came up the same evening that I’d fired them to hand over a huge bill, which also included all of the work they hadn’t done. I guess he had no problem finding the time for that,” she said, shaking her head.

  Camilla finished her coffee and got up to gather up her things. She called for Markus and told him it was time to go.

  “I’m in the bathroom,” he called back.

  “You could just postpone the wedding. That way you’d have more time to get everything in place,” Louise suggested.

  “We could, but I don’t want to. If I’m getting married, it has to be this summer. I’m crazy about him. I’ve never felt such a sense of belonging with someone as I do with him,” she declared. “We’re going to have a big, amazing summer wedding, dancing around barefoot in the yard and spending our wedding night on a mattress beneath the apple trees with candlelight and plenty of champagne.”

  In the beginning Louise had considered the relationship between her friend and Frederik Sachs-Smith a passing fling, but it seemed that Camilla had found the love of her life. It would be interesting to see how two such different lives could be combined, she thought. Her friend, the journalist, who had lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the city and had always taken care of herself and devoted herself to her own interests. And the rich guy who had sat on the deck by his pool in California, writing his film scripts and never wanting for anything. In addition to the family money from Termo-Lux, he had built a considerable fortune by investing wisely, and he had been a bachelor until Camilla entered the picture.

  Markus’s shouting roused Louise from her thoughts. She could only hope her friend knew exactly what she was doing.

  Are you coming?” Markus demanded of his mother from the entrance hall.

  14

  CONGRATULATIONS,” RAGNER RØNHOLT exclaimed from the doorway the following morning. “Good job with the identification. Now we can close the case.”

  He smiled approvingly at Louise and went on: “I’ve gotten ahold of Lars Jørgensen’s résumé, and I intend to have him over for a talk later this week.”

  Louise put her hand up to make her boss stop.

  “We’re not ready to close the case,” she corrected him. “Lise Andersen has been missing for thirty-one years without anyone knowing it. The case has only just been opened.”

  “But now that she’s been found and identified, her past is no longer relevant to us,” he maintained.

  She looked at him in surprise while he ran his hand over his well-groomed beard.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “If this special unit is to be justified, it is relevant to find out what’s happened in this woman’s life since a false death certificate was issued in 1980.”

  Eik walked through the door, eyes squinting and hair unruly, and she gave him a quick nod.

  “Weren’t we supposed to look at the cases that can’t be classified as standard disappearance cases?”

  “Exactly,” Rønholt said. “Your job is to focus on missing person cases where we suspect that a crime is involved. And this woman is no longer missing.”

  “Maybe so,” she replied. “But I want to know what happened to Lisemette. How can there be a death certificate when she only just died last week? That seems suspicious to me.”

  “And how come nobody’s missed her since the accident in the woods?” Eik cut in. “We know that she’d been sexually intimate with a man just before she died. Someone knows about her.”

  “The case is closed,” Rønholt insisted, and Louise felt flushed with anger as he went on: “Make sure it gets archived correctly in the system that’s been set up for the new department.”

  As he was about to leave, she stood up.

  “We can’t file it until we know what happened to the twin sisters,” she tried. “What about the other one; where is she? Her death certificate may have been forged as well.”

  “We have other cases piling up,” was his reply. “And one case closed means one less in the pile.”

  LOUISE SLAMMED THE door behind him and walked over to the window. She crossed her arms. If it turned out that she had quit the Homicide Department for a job that was only about closing and archiving cases, it would be the mistake of a lifetime. The anger felt like a stab in her chest, and she paused for a moment before she was able to turn around and sit down again.

  “That’s his weakness,” Eik said after she sat down. “Rønholt tends to be a bit rigid once the workload starts to grow, and he wants to please management by showing results.”

  “I couldn’t care less about who he’s trying to please,” Louise said sourly. “It’s bad practice to close a case before it’s finished. If that’s how it’s going to be then I won’t be at the helm.”

  “I agree.” He put his feet up on the desk. “I suggest we get Viggo Andersen to file a missing person report for Mette. Then we have a case and we can continue.”

  Louise looked at him with surprise and nodded approvingly. But then she hesitated. “Can you file a missing person report when there’s a death certificate?”

  Eik folded his hands behind his head. “If we can show the probability that she didn’t pass away back then, either, then I should think so.”

  Her face turned pensive. “The undertaker…” she said. “The undertaker who arranged the funerals at Eliselund. I’ll call Viggo Andersen and suggest that he have a talk with him.”

  15

  I’D LIKE TO file a missing person report for my other daughter,” Lisemette’s father began as he called back just after lunch. “I’ve s
poken with both the son who took over the funeral home that was in charge of all funerals from Eliselund and with his father, who owned the business back in 1980. The father retired that same year. He still has all his old appointment books and he’s willing to swear that he didn’t bury any of my girls. The only person he buried from Eliselund that year before handing over the business to his son was a man who was so overweight that he wouldn’t fit in a standard coffin. That turned into a big mess because they couldn’t agree on who should pay for the custom coffin. Also, he’s absolutely certain that he never buried a pair of twin girls at the same time.”

  Louise smiled at Eik.

  “I also told him that I didn’t understand how they could make out death certificates for people who didn’t die,” Viggo Andersen went on.

  “What did he have to say to that?” she asked with curiosity and got out a pen.

  “He suggested that I check with the parish office to find out if the death was recorded in the parish register.”

  “And it wasn’t?” Louise guessed, holding her breath.

  Viggo Andersen told her that the woman at the parish office had checked through the register from 1980 twice. “Neither of the girls had been entered. In fact, no one their age was even buried that year,” the father finished, his voice sounding pained. “But now I’ve identified Lise myself so there’s no doubt that she didn’t die back then. I just simply can’t understand how this happened. Why was I told something like that? It’s just incomprehensible… And what became of Mette? We have to find out if she’s alive, too.”

  Louise understood his urgency. She knew it had to be completely surreal for him to see his daughter after believing for so many years that she was dead. She had been a little girl the last time they had been together.

  “Now we’ll write up an official missing person report for your daughter,” she promised, “and then we’ll continue our search. Thank you so much for all you’ve done.”

  “I should be thanking you,” he said and asked Louise to keep him informed.

  She brought her scribbled notes down the hall to Rønholt’s office.

  “I just got a call from Viggo Andersen. He’s filing a missing person report for the other twin,” she told him from the doorway. The front office was empty, and her boss was watering his plants.

  Rønholt put down the pitcher. “Now you’re being stubborn,” he said irritably.

  “Neither of the girls was ever buried and their deaths were never recorded in the parish register,” Louise calmly explained. “There’s every reason to believe that Mette’s still alive.”

  “Well, Jesus, then go find her!”

  “WE’RE PROCEEDING,” LOUISE said when she returned from Rønholt’s office. She started to unfold a map on the desk. “If we can find out where Lise stayed for the thirty-plus years she was outside the system, then maybe we’ll find Mette.”

  “There must be a limit to how far she could have walked through the woods barefoot,” Eik said, leaning in over the map while searching for Avnsø Lake. He smelled of cigarettes and leather, and Louise moved over a little to allow him a better view.

  She drew an X on the map where Lise was found. “What do you think?” she asked. “Does two, three miles from where we found her sound realistic?”

  Eik nodded. Louise placed her pencil on the map and drew a circle to indicate the radius.

  “Are there any houses within that area?” he asked.

  Louise considered his question. Actually all the houses she knew of in the forest qualified. The circle encompassed both the forester’s house in one direction and the Snipe House out toward Skjoldnæsholm; then of course there were the houses in Lerbjerg from the Tollhouse to Crane House.

  “Yes, there are several,” she said. “I think the most interesting houses are the ones inside the forest. I guess there are five or six of them. Let’s start with those, and then we can move on to the couple of houses on the street where the child care provider lived.”

  When Louise returned from the copy room with more pictures of Lise, Eik stood holding a cup of coffee. He asked if she wanted one for the drive, too. She was about to say no then caught herself. It wouldn’t hurt to be a little more approachable.

  “Yes, please,” she said and smiled at him.

  THEY DROVE INTO the woods on the same road as last time, but instead of turning off toward Avnsø Lake they continued straight ahead. An old timber-frame house lay almost entirely hidden among the tall trees.

  “Does anyone live in there?” Eik exclaimed in surprise as they got out.

  A couple of dogs barked and threw themselves at the gate before they reached it.

  “There, there…” Louise tried to calm them down without much luck, and she startled when something suddenly jangled right by her ear.

  Eik had pulled the string of a large ship’s bell that hung from the fencepost by the gate. “I guess you’re supposed to ring the bell,” he said and pulled it one more time.

  “Coming.” They heard a deep voice from a black wooden shed next to the house. A small man in blue overalls appeared with an ax in his hand. “Shut up now!” he yelled at the dogs before walking toward them.

  “Hey, Verner.” Louise smiled as he looked at her with surprise.

  “Is that you?” he exclaimed. “Last time I saw you, you had braids and were riding bareback on a Norwegian pony.”

  He was missing two teeth next to his right-side front tooth, which left a black gap in his mouth when he smiled. Verner Post was the epitome of good nature and had lived in the Snipe House for as long as Louise had been coming to the woods. He often visited her parents and helped her father fell trees, and he brought up the horse and the braids every time he saw her. She thought there were certain things you just never outgrew.

  She led the way through the gate after he opened it. The dogs had lain down in the shade by the house wall and barely bothered to raise their heads as they walked by.

  “A woman was found out by Avnsø Lake last week,” Louise started after introducing Eik.

  “Yes, terrible story with those little ones.” He told her that one of the children was Lene’s grandchild. “Lene from the doctor’s office—you know her, right?”

  Louise nodded. She remembered the medical secretary well, but she didn’t know her daughter or the grandchild.

  “That’s actually not the woman we’re here to talk about though.” She got the pictures of Lise Andersen’s face with closed eyes out of her bag. She told him about the accident by the slope but left out the rest of the woman’s story.

  “We believe she may have lived out here in the woods or somewhere nearby. The woman looked quite ragged when we found her so she might have been homeless.”

  Verner Post had looped his thumbs through the straps of his overalls. “They do come around from time to time.” He let the drifters sleep in the shed when the weather acted up, he continued. “They always know where to find shelter and a bottle of beer. Not too many people around here that are happy to put them up. But I don’t think I’ve seen that one there. The only woman who shows up with that crowd sometimes is the Tiger Princess, but she hasn’t come around since her husband died.”

  He squinted a little as he tried to remember.

  “I believe he was the one who got hit by a car when he was walking along the main road with his pram.”

  The thought that Lise might have taken to the road hadn’t occurred to Louise. There weren’t many vagabonds left, but of course it was worth following up on.

  “She would never have survived a life like that,” Eik cut in, reminding her that Lise had been severely handicapped.

  “You’re probably right,” Louise agreed. Although many of those who walked the country roads had drowned most of their brain cells in alcohol, they were nonetheless people who were able to take care of themselves.

  “Could she have been staying with someone out here?” Eik suggested in an attempt to get Verner Post thinking along other lines.

&nb
sp; The small man stared straight ahead for a moment while thinking. Then he shook his head. “It’s mostly people from the city moving into the houses out here these days. It all seems so idyllic to them,” he said sarcastically and shook his head.

  “Are any of the houses empty?” Eik asked.

  Louise was relieved to let him do the talking. She felt a little awkward questioning people she knew.

  Verner Post frowned a little and rubbed his chin as he pondered the question. “Pasture House,” he suggested. “It’s been empty for a long time, but it’s farther away from here, of course.”

  He looked at Louise. “You know, out toward Ny Tolstrup.”

  She nodded.

  “Actually someone just moved in,” he added. “I think I saw a car parked there last time I passed by. But you should ask Bodil. She lives closer.”

  At the mention of the name, Louise and Eik looked at each other. She nodded again and signaled to her partner. It was enough; there was nothing more to talk about.

  “Tell my folks hi,” she said. It had been over a month since she had seen her parents. “You’ll probably see them before I do.”

  “PASTURE HOUSE,” EIK said as he tossed his leather jacket into the backseat before getting in the car. “You know the way.”

  Louise nodded. One of her friends from school had lived there for a while. “It’s not far from the gamekeeper’s house if you go through the woods,” she explained, and added that talking to Bodil was an excellent idea. “She’s the one who’s married to Jørgen—the guy who waved to us. They’ve lived in the woods a long time and know the area. She worked at Avnstrup Sanatorium, which was a care unit under Saint Hans Hospital before it closed down. When I was a kid, we used to ride our bikes to buy candy at Tutten—the kiosk at Avnstrup—and we were always scared shitless because some of the patients would say weird things when we ran into them.”

  She suddenly realized that she was making small talk about things that were none of his business.