The Butterfly House

by Katrine Engberg

  She drank again. It helped a little.

  Dóxa and Epistéme barked impatiently. She would need to walk them soon. But first she needed to force herself to think of something besides Alain. The betrayal stung with the force of shame, and she was afraid her legs wouldn’t hold her up. She put on a record, but turned it off again as soon as the music started flowing from the speakers, sent Jeppe Kørner a text that Gregers was improving, and considered a bath but rejected the idea at the prospect of having to look at her own naked reflection. Then she sat down at the computer again and opened a newspaper webpage.

  Esther read articles about traffic infrastructure, an injured soccer player who was being flown home from Italy, and backlash against a shoe company for a sexist ad. The sentences swam indiscriminately from the screen into her head, having the same effect as the wine. A pleasant numbness spread through her.

  The fountain murders occupied multiple columns talking about K9 units, cargo bikes, and unidentified staff members. The words swam before her teary eyes.

  Esther closed her computer and got the dogs’ leashes. She had to pull herself together! There were worse problems in the world than hers.

  * * *

  “IT SAID GYM H, didn’t it? Must be over here.”

  Jeppe pointed down the long hallway at Grøndal MultiCenter, past the squash courts, dance studios, and boxing rings, looking for the signs with gym names. Green plants and trees covered the slightly discouraging concrete walls in an attempt to create a cozy, vibrant atmosphere. It certainly wasn’t that the place lacked life. Groups of teenagers with sports bags clustered around cell phones, senior citizens drank coffee in the café, and cheerful kid squeals could be heard from all sides.

  The schedule in the lobby said that MG Talent Team practiced on Thursdays from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. in Gym H, and according to Lisbeth Ramsgaard that was where the police would find Bo: at gymnastics with their youngest daughter. She was on board with their bringing him in and promised to arrange for the daughter to go home with a friend until she herself made it to Copenhagen and was able to pick her up. Still, Jeppe felt uncomfortable about the situation.

  As he walked down the hallway toward Gym H with Falck and two uniformed officers, the idea of bringing a man in this way—in front of his ten-year-old daughter, her friends, and their parents—seemed less and less appealing. But Jeppe had to push forward, as he no longer had time for being considerate.

  Conversation in the hallways dwindled away and people gawked at the little police processional. They left a wake of curious mumbling behind them.

  Gym H was full of beams, gym pads, and large trampolines on which children around ten to twelve years old took turns balancing, stretching, and doing backflips. The space smelled of sweat, cleaner, and break-time bananas, and a salsa hit from last summer played over the crackling sound system.

  On bleachers along one of the walls parents and younger siblings were seated. Jeppe spotted Bo Ramsgaard right away. He sat calmly with a gymnastics bag on his lap and watched his daughter practicing a jump on the trampoline. Her skinny little body could hardly get enough height in the jumps to make it all the way around in the air, but she didn’t give up. She jumped again and again with a concentrated expression on her little face and anxious sidelong glances at the stands. Most of the parents were chatting, but Bo Ramsgaard was only watching his daughter.

  He looked like any other parent, in a cheap windbreaker with curly hair, a normal parent who took his daughter to gymnastic lessons and thought she was the best of them all. Was he also a parent who was unable to forgive the system for having failed his fragile, older daughter?

  Bo turned around and looked right at them. Jeppe could tell he understood that they were here for him and knew he wasn’t planning to accompany them voluntarily. He looked back at his daughter as if contemplating whether he could snatch her off the trampoline and run before the police reached him. But she was too far away, the trampoline too high. It was a lost cause. He rose, standing like a wounded animal in the line of fire, and looked back and forth from the trampolines to the police.

  “Hi, Mr. Ramsgaard. We’d like to—” Jeppe didn’t get any further before he was interrupted.

  “I’m not coming with you. I’m here with my daughter, what are you thinking, for fuck’s sake?” Bo lowered his voice and hissed, “You could have called!”

  “Your wife is taking care of your daughter, so if you would just come with us, quietly, no fuss.” Out of the corner of his eye Jeppe could see that all activity on the mats and trampolines had stopped. Bo’s daughter stood motionless, looking at her father with big, frightened eyes. The whole room was watching. Jeppe lowered his voice still further.

  “There’s no reason to make this any worse…”

  The sports bag sailed right over Jeppe’s head. The swing came from so low down that he managed to see it and duck out of the way; the shove to his chest, however, he did not see coming. Rage fueled the father’s strength, and Jeppe had the wind completely knocked out of him.

  “What the hell are you thinking?”

  Jeppe straightened up and met the father’s furious gaze. While the officers closed in on him, he saw Bo realize that he had crossed a line.

  He ran.

  Bo Ramsgaard pushed his way past the crowd of parents and coaches, stumbled, got back up, and ran again for the gym exit. The officers were only two steps away and caught him in a firm shoulder lock just as Jeppe reached them. Bo punched at one of the officers, then tipped backward with a roar that echoed through the gym.

  The officers rolled him onto his stomach and put a knee on his back.

  “Assaulting an on-duty police officer. Do you know what that gets you?”

  “My daughter!” Bo exclaimed. “You can’t just take me. What the hell?!”

  “You daughter will go home with a friend, and your wife will pick her up there. Arrangements have been made for her.”

  The two officers pulled Bo to his feet and started walking him toward the exit.

  “Leave me alone, you idiots. Listen, I don’t have anything to do with it.”

  Jeppe glanced over his shoulder and made eye contact with the daughter. She was standing on the trampoline, watching her father being led away, so small and thin that she seemed almost see-through. Sticklike arms hanging helplessly at her sides, eyes glazing over.

  Jeppe bowed his head in shame.

  * * *

  “WELL, THEN, I’M going to zip home,” Gorm said. “I’ll get those attachments copied one of these days.”

  “One of these days?!” Simon Hartvig rolled his eyes at his colleague. “The new application needs to be sent before the weekend. We need to put some pressure on them now, Gorm, or they’ll just reject it like everyone else.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Gorm sighed. “I’ll get it done. Have a good night!”

  He and Gorm fist-bumped and Simon returned to his dinner. He would have preferred to cancel this meeting with the kitchen garden committee—for many reasons—but hadn’t had the heart to do it. What was an hour’s worth of awkward discomfort compared to the benefit a garden would bring to the patients?

  Fresh air, the joy of growing things, healthier food, maybe even a path to lowering medication dosages. Besides it would look unfortunate to cancel, now that Gorm was asking annoying questions. He had to fix that. But not until tomorrow.

  As soon as he had eaten his dinner, he would bike home for his first night off all week. He had been looking forward to spending the night in his own bed. Now that joy was deteriorating.

  Simon pushed the potatoes around in the parsley sauce on his plate. Winter potatoes in cream sauce with dried herbs would make you lose your appetite, if it wasn’t already gone. How the hell could they defend serving this dog food to the patients, to anyone? He took another bite of potato and immediately regretted it. The sauce tasted like mucus in his mouth and made him feel like throwing up.

  He gave up. Discreetly, he spit the potato out into his napkin and
carried the plate to the cafeteria’s dish rack, poured himself a half cup of coffee to wash down a pill, and headed back to the ward. Rejection ran like a thread through his life; a chain of defeats, urged along by his father, by municipal bureaucrats, by the world. To think that those assholes wouldn’t let him modernize the hospital cafeteria when he tried! Politicians should be forced to eat this hospital slop, just for a week. Then maybe they would change their minds.

  What had gone wrong?

  Simon passed one of the big windows overlooking the grounds, where old trees were dripping sadly on the benches and paths. More rain, his raincoat never dried out these days. Isak was out there somewhere in the rain without his medication, without food, without shelter, without anyone to look after him. Unless…

  If Isak hadn’t run away on his own, he must have had help from someone he knew.

  Marie.

  Simon left the coffee behind and hurried back to Isak’s room. The curtains were drawn and the bed was made, the room neatly done up after having been searched by both police and staff. It was just waiting for its occupant. Simon ran his finger over the book spines on Isak’s shelf and stopped at the most worn one, Papillon. Hadn’t Isak taken that with him yesterday? Simon pulled out the book and leafed through it. Inside the front cover he found what he was looking for. Three words, sloppily written in pencil.

  Fredens Havn, Holmen.

  He let the information sink in, in all its harsh reality. Her suspicious look, the question of whether they were being watched. If she had wanted to communicate something secret, this is precisely how it would have happened.

  Isak must be with her.

  Simon put the book back and wondered what he should do now. Call the police and tell them what he had found?

  Gorm had started asking questions and looking at him weirdly; surely he was checking up on him. Maybe the charge nurse had already been alerted and was already investigating where the electronic tracker on his key fob had been. The single potato he had managed to eat threatened to come back up. He couldn’t risk involving the police.

  Not now, when he and Peter Demant were finally going to meet again.

  * * *

  MARIE BIRCH WATCHED Isak let the gray light from the streetlamp fall on his face and felt a familiar pang in her heart. She should have gone to see him before, shouldn’t have waited so long. Fear had controlled her, the fear of what he might do if she got involved. She knew what he was capable of, had experienced it on her own body.

  Now here they were. Set up and hiding in one of the Count’s friend’s little yellow houses in the area called the Blue Caramel behind Refshalevej, only a hundred yards from Fredens Havn. In the back room, she had made them a temporary home with roll-up mattresses and blankets, flashlights, a camp stove, and a few books. Isak had slept, pretty much since he got out of the taxi last night.

  Marie was working up the courage to ask him what had happened that night at Butterfly House—the night Kim died—but the right moment hadn’t come yet. She dreaded his reaction, and what he would say. But she couldn’t let fear control her anymore. She knew Isak cared about her, and that would have to be safety enough for now.

  “I should get started on dinner. You must be hungry, too. Will you help me peel the vegetables?”

  “Let me just sit for a little longer, just another minute. This is the first time in forever that I’m not under supervision.”

  Marie drew damp air down into her lungs and closed her eyes. What would become of them? She had learned to beg, steal, and lie. She was used to life on the streets. Knew which people she could trust and who she should just leave be. Down in the Colony she had gone cold turkey, and now she was off meds, clear in the head, independent.

  But Isak… Isak didn’t have any skills. He had lived his whole life in a bubble, and although the bubble had been filled with pain, it had also protected him. Marie couldn’t take care of them both very long, a few days at the most, assuming Isak could even manage off his meds. He might start to react, hallucinate, and have panic attacks, and she had no idea if she would be able to handle that. But she didn’t let her uncertainty show, and Isak seemed blissfully unaware.

  “Do you remember when we hid in the bushes behind the lake and pretended we had run away, like in the book?” Isak spoke, his eyes still closed up against the light from the streetlamp.

  “I do,” Marie said with a smile. “We talked about all the things we would do if we could do whatever we wanted.”

  “I wanted to go to school, a proper school, take over my dad’s business, make him proud.”

  “And I wanted to take riding lessons, have my own horse. Or share one, at least.”

  “That was the happiest time of my life.”

  She got a lump in her throat. Why is feeling someone else’s pain so much easier than bearing your own? Probably because your own pain can kill you. You store it away in blast-proof boxes and dump them on the bottom of your consciousness, so that the memories only stir when there’s a storm.

  “Come on, Isak! Let’s get going on dinner.”

  “I’m not feeling well,” Isak said, opening his eyes. “I’m cold.”

  Marie noticed the beads of sweat on his temples and his chest, which was pumping like the hi-hat at a techno party.

  It was starting already. And she had nothing but root vegetables and good intentions with which to tackle the symptoms.

  “Find a book, Isak. Wrap yourself in the blanket and try and see if you can read a little.”

  Isak’s hands flapped around his head for no reason.

  “I’m not scared, Marie. I can handle it.”

  “Sit, Isak. I’ll make dinner. Let’s see if we can relax together, okay?”

  Marie squatted down and lit the camp stove, poured water into the pot, and took out a bag of parsley roots. Her question would have to wait a little longer. But not too long. She could hear Isak flipping through pages and mumbling breathlessly to himself.

  Almost imperceptibly she opened her little hunting knife and dropped it discreetly into her pocket.

  CHAPTER 20

  Peter Demant is a quack!

  Demant’s overmedication leads to suicide.

  Take away Demant’s authorization!

  Anette yawned and browsed on through hate-filled Facebook updates with one hand while rocking her daughter’s cradle with the other. Apart from the elephant lamp and the blue light from the computer the bedroom was dark.

  Fatigue was creeping over Anette like a lazy wave, inescapable and warm. From the kitchen, she could hear Svend clanking dishes and felt a stab of longing for the days when evenings were spent together—dishes, an evening coffee, a kiss, and real conversation. Now they put the baby to bed and cleaned the kitchen in shifts, swapped a tired high five when they passed each other in the hallway, and divvied the tasks up between them instead of doing them together. It was a different life. Was it so taboo to say that she sometimes missed the way things used to be? Just a little?

  She returned her attention to the computer, and tried to skim through articles on amygdala hyperactivity and stereotypical self-injurious behavior. It was confusing reading to put it mildly, and not just because the technical vocabulary was way above her level.

  Peter Demant was a productive guy, but a controversial psychiatrist. On the one hand successful with high-profile research projects in treating schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder. On the other hand accused of being in the pocket of private business interests and maligned in several Facebook groups for having prescribed the wrong medication or overmedicating patients. But there’s a long way from utilizing questionable treatment methods to torturing and murdering. Just because he prescribes too many pills, doesn’t mean he kills, she thought, smiling tiredly at her own rhyme.

  The baby whined, and Anette started rocking the cradle again, humming absentmindedly until she settled down. She clicked on the story about a patient of Peter Demant’s who had committed suicide. It was written as a blog
post by the dead boy’s aunt and brimmed with a rancor and rage that made it hard to read. Four years ago Charlie, the young boy, had suffered from depression and gone to Demant who had prescribed Cipralex, or unhappy pills, as his aunt called them. The way she told it, Charlie became addicted to the medicine and started deteriorating rapidly. One morning he packed his backpack for school and rode off on his bike as usual. But instead of going to school, he rode out to the highway bridge by Skallebølle, parked his bike along the railing, and jumped off the bridge. He was sixteen. The family demanded that Demant be held accountable for what they called malpractice.

  Demant did not officially respond to the family’s accusations, but on his own home page he had written a general piece on Cipralex treatment in pediatric patients, which explained and justified his methods.

  In other words, Pernille Ramsgaard’s parents weren’t alone in their criticism of Demant. But, Anette thought, that type of culpability is notoriously hard to pin down.

  She attached the relevant articles and links to an email, which she sent to Jeppe with the subject line: Yeah, yeah, I know.

  Could Demant’s alleged malpractice be related to the murders of the three employees? But if so, then what reason would Demant have had to kill Rita Wilkins, who had apparently supported him?

  Anette rubbed her eyes. It didn’t make any sense.

  Svend carefully opened the door.

  “Still not sleeping?” he whispered.

  Anette peeked into the crib. Their daughter was sound asleep, looking like Tanja Kruse’s pretty little doll baby, just in a warm, living version.

  “Time got away from me, I guess. She’s asleep.” Anette shut the computer.

  Maybe they could still enjoy a little grown-up time together before going to bed. A nice, uncomplicated break where they could be tender and loving like they used to. They needed that.