The Forgotten Girls

by Sara Blaedel

  “And the kids—are they still down there?” Mik asked, pointing ahead toward the lake.

  “They’re sleeping but my colleague is with them.” Louise added that they were probably both thirsty and hungry.

  Deep in thought, she stood for a moment and watched the car and then the forensic officers’ blue van drive by.

  EIK WAS SITTING on the bench, talking to a male colleague from Holbæk, when Louise returned. The children were still sleeping on the ground. The area to his right was being cordoned off, and another police car came down the forest road.

  “We heard the kids,” Eik explained. There was dirt on his pants, and his T-shirt was still wet on the shoulder where the boy had cried. “It was probably five, ten minutes before Louise found her.” He turned to her. “Isn’t that about right?”

  Louise nodded and watched as Mik walked back from where the body was. She noticed that the stroller had been picked up.

  “Her name is Karin Lund,” he told them as he got to the bench, the woman’s wallet in hand. “She lives on Stokkebo Road. Does that ring a bell?” He looked at Louise.

  She thought for a moment then shook her head. Another road led to the camping cabin—that might be it, but she wasn’t sure.

  “My guess is that you need to continue straight on from here and then stay left when the road forks,” she explained as she pointed up behind them. “There’s a big parking lot at the end of the forest road that runs over there. Stokkebo Road could be the gravel road that continues out of the woods.”

  She couldn’t recall any other entrances into the woods within such a short distance.

  “There are some houses there at least,” she added.

  The forensic officers had begun searching the area around the body for evidence. The stroller had been pushed away from the path a little. For a moment Louise was struck by the intense concentration that always descended over a new crime scene. Everyone was working on their assignment, and nothing could be overlooked.

  Today she just wasn’t part of the team.

  “We need to take the kids back to the address,” Mik said to his female colleague.

  His leadership and way of assigning tasks seemed relaxed and natural. Though this was the first time Louise was working with him as he headed an investigation, Jonas had recently told her that Mik had been promoted. They still kept in touch. And shared Dina.

  The yellow Lab was actually Mik’s dog, but after Jonas lost his father and moved in with Louise, Mik had offered him the puppy. And she knew that very few twelve-year-olds would be able to turn down an offer like that. Nonetheless, she’d been furious. Because they had failed to consult her, and she had no plans whatsoever of being tied down by a dog needing food and walks at regular intervals throughout the day.

  Now Mik walked over and stood beside her. “I was a bit puzzled when I saw that the dispatcher had put you down as the person who found her.”

  “I should have notified you guys that we were driving down here,” she apologized. It was standard procedure to check in when conducting investigations in other police districts even when they were the ones who had asked for assistance. “There was an accident out here last week,” she went on, telling him that they had come to see the place where the woman had fallen to her death. “And then we’re going to talk to the guy who found her.”

  He told her that he was the one who had passed on the case to them.

  “Could the two cases be connected?” Louise asked.

  Mik shook his head. “There’s no indication that the woman from last week was the victim of a crime. We brought the dogs out here to search the area but they didn’t come up with a thing. Of course we shouldn’t rule out anything but the autopsy shows that she died from the injuries she sustained in the fall, and her footprints were the only ones by the edge. Did you find out her identity?”

  “Not yet, but we’re working on it.”

  She was happy to see him but could tell that whatever had existed between them was now gone. In exchange, no anger remained, either; only the camaraderie and the professional relationship, which suited her just fine. It suddenly seemed very natural to be standing there, talking as colleagues. Louise smiled at him.

  “It’s good to see you,” she whispered before anyone else could overhear. Eik had left the children in the care of the female officer and was now leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.

  “Have you settled into your new position?” he asked.

  She automatically started to nod but then caught herself. “Not really,” she admitted. “But I’m sure it’s just teething troubles.”

  She sometimes experienced pangs—she’d miss Mik, then snap out of it quickly, realizing it had needed to end and she was far better off without him. Given the familial ties that had grown between them, she’d felt a void after the breakup. Of course she had Jonas and Melvin—their retired neighbor in the downstairs apartment, who loved to spoil them a little and cook dinner when Louise did not make it home in time. But that still left the nights. And Louise just had to accept the fact that she was the kind of person willing to give up sex if it meant also giving up the pressure of having to be something for someone else.

  “Do you need us for anything else?” she asked, signaling to Eik that they ought to be moving on. “We haven’t been to the slope yet and we still need to speak with the forest worker.”

  “Not at the moment, I don’t think,” Mik answered. “I don’t suppose you saw anything when you drove in here?”

  Louise shook her head. “Not until we found the kids.”

  The little ones were being placed in the backseat of the police car. The girl whimpered, the volume rising when the officer tried to buckle the seat belt around her slight body. The other two seemed to have gone into hibernation—they let themselves be buckled in without any objections.

  “We’ll take the back way,” Louise decided, pointing toward the slope and the lakeside below. She stood for a moment and watched the police car drive away. She actually felt more like sticking around to follow the work.

  “Coming,” Eik answered, making sure that his cigarette was out before shoving the butt in his pocket.

  7

  THE PATH LEADING to the slope where the unidentified woman had been found was not easily passable. It was muddy and slippery, and they needed to cross the creek to get to the other side.

  “There’s usually a couple of tree trunks up ahead to cross on,” Louise remembered, signaling Eik to follow her through the trees.

  She assumed that they would learn the most by going to the top of the slope. There was little to gain from seeing the place where the woman had landed.

  “Do people hang out all the way around the lake?” Eik asked, gasping for breath behind her.

  “No, mostly by the swing. And of course some go to the area below the meadow by the camping cabin.”

  “So if she was homeless and had her camp somewhere nearby, it’s possible that nobody would have seen it,” he concluded just as he tripped on a stump.

  “Only if it was right around here,” Louise agreed and balanced her way across the creek on a narrow tree trunk.

  THE SLOPE WAS steep, and the drop was about sixteen to twenty feet, Louise estimated as she contemplated the spot where the woman had fallen to her death. Neither path nor trail led down from there. From where they stood, it mostly looked as if the ground just disappeared in a free fall down through the wide tree trunks.

  “Seems like it must have happened after dark,” Louise said. “Otherwise the woman would have surely noticed the steep drop.”

  “What the hell was she doing up here?” Eik mumbled and walked all the way to the edge. “It’s not exactly a place you just happen to pass by.”

  Above the slope, the entire area was shaded by the tall trees.

  “Could she have been lost?” he suggested, looking around. He had taken off his leather jacket and carried it over his shoulder with one finger. “Perhaps if she came from that camping ca
bin you keep talking about?”

  Louise nodded. “It would be difficult to find your way in the dark,” she said. There was nothing to take bearings of unless light shone through the windows of the cabin.

  “Can we find out whether it was rented out last week?”

  Louise shrugged. “Maybe the forest worker knows. Let’s ask him.”

  They began walking back but stayed at the top this time to avoid the creek.

  “The cabin’s back there,” she said, pointing to the left. She noticed that the fire pit by the lake was still there. It had even been spruced up with stumps to sit on. As she recalled, they used to sit on the ground.

  Together they continued across a small, grassy hilltop, and from there they could see the green wooden cabin. It wasn’t as small as she recalled, but of course it could have been expanded within the past twenty years.

  “It would make sense if she’d been walking from here.” Eik looked back in the direction they’d come from.

  Louise nodded. It was possible if the woman had used the cabin for shelter when it wasn’t rented out.

  In front of the cabin was a large, gravel yard and to the left was a lawn, which needed to be mowed. There were two large swing sets, and Louise spotted a couple of benches in the tall grass. There hadn’t been people here for the past few days, she noted, because the grass had not been trampled down anywhere.

  They walked over to the house and looked through the windows. A typical school camp place, Eik noted. Bunk beds and the tables had been pushed together in the dining room. Along the walls, chairs were stacked high. There was no sign of anything resembling a homeless woman’s possessions in either the common room or any of the multiple bedrooms in the building’s two long wings.

  “What do we know about the forest worker?” Louise asked after she had turned the car around and Eik had gotten the police report out of the glove compartment.

  “We know his name is Thomsen,” he read, “and he lives in Skov Hastrup. Are you familiar with that place, too?”

  Louise nodded, once again concentrating on the potholes. She blinked and proceeded slowly to keep stone chips from hitting the car. The sun was bright through the leafy treetops and blinded them like photography flashes cut off by the moving leaves.

  She was about to speed up as they emerged from the forest, but just then she spotted a large man standing with a rake in the yard outside the old gamekeeper’s house, waiting for them to pass by. Instead Louise eased off the gas and waved.

  The man waved back eagerly like an excited child.

  Louise took her time before speeding up and drove past the driveway with one hand still raised as a greeting.

  “Old boyfriend of yours?” Eik laughed and joined in waving to the man, whose grin grew even bigger.

  “You could say that.” Louise told Eik that the man in the lumberjack shirt had been in a work accident. “He was working at a construction site and had just removed his hard hat to put on a sweater when an iron pipe fell from the scaffold. He and his wife moved out here shortly after the accident, and she’s been taking care of him since. Jørgen is always there, waving whenever someone drives by.”

  Eik stopped laughing and looked in the side-view mirror at the man with the rake, who still had his arm raised.

  It was less than two miles to Skov Hastrup, a tiny village shaped like a crescent behind the main road to Hvalsø.

  “Tell me the forest worker’s name again,” she asked, signaling to turn.

  “Ole Thomsen,” he read off and coughed once more as if his lungs were trying to escape from the deep.

  Big Thomsen, Louise thought, nodding to herself. She could certainly picture him. More brawn than brains. As she recalled, he had worked in the gravel pit, so it was no stretch of the imagination to think that he would have made the transfer to the woods.

  “He lives somewhere called Glentesø Road,” Eik went on once he had caught his breath.

  She pulled away from the main road and drove down a narrow road with wide shoulders.

  “It could be the next farm down there,” Eik suggested, pointing ahead at a turn in the road.

  Louise slowed before turning into the courtyard, where she parked behind a beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser.

  She had just turned off the engine when the kitchen door swung open, allowing her a clear view. Big Thomsen had barely changed. He was still tall and muscular, but his dark hair was shorter than the last time she had seen him, and he was balding above his temples. The new haircut was probably meant to disguise his receding hairline, Louise thought as she got out of the car.

  She let Eik take the lead and stayed in the background as he introduced himself and explained that he was aware Ole Thomsen had already made his statement to the Holbæk Police Department; they had just a few follow-up questions.

  “Do you mind if I use the Dictaphone?” Eik asked and pulled the small voice recorder from his pocket.

  Big Thomsen nodded expectantly. He leaned back a little, arms folded across his chest, so he was looking down at them slightly. At first glance there was nothing to suggest that he recognized Louise, she noted with a sense of relief. Not even when she reached out her hand and introduced herself. He just accepted it, his wholesale lack of interest or curiosity palpable.

  “Well… I guess there isn’t much more to tell, though,” he drawled, biting his lip as if thinking were a strenuous exercise. “She was just lying there, dead.” He shrugged.

  “And you didn’t recognize her?” Eik asked.

  “I hadn’t seen her before.”

  “You didn’t see her walking around the area?”

  “Never.”

  “Could she have been staying in the cabin up there?” Eik suggested.

  “I sure as hell don’t think so!” Big Thomsen firmly exclaimed. “That’s Boner’s area… you know, Bo Knudsen from out by Særløse. He keeps an eye on things; keeps away kids and stuff like that so they don’t run around throwing rocks through the windows and tearing the place apart. He’s up there daily when no one is staying there.”

  “And was the cabin rented out last week?”

  Big Thomsen exhaled heavily and squinted a little before shaking his head. “I don’t think so. But next week there’s some people coming down from Hillerød. They come down every year, and there’s one of the counselors in particular who’s worth keeping an eye on.” He sent a knowing wink in Eik’s direction. “We always kind of pay attention to who’s around in the woods.”

  Eik asked whether he had a phone number for Bo Knudsen.

  Louise remembered Boner. He was a small guy who had been a few grades ahead of her. His parents had a large farm, and there were days when he didn’t have a chance to change out of his boiler suit after helping out with the cows in the morning before school.

  Ole Thomsen got his cell phone out of his chest pocket and focused intently on pressing the buttons with hands much too big for the task.

  “Why don’t you call and ask him yourselves,” he grumbled after giving them the number.

  Yeah, I’m thinking we will, Louise thought irritably.

  “Could the woman have set up camp somewhere in the woods?” Eik continued, unaffected.

  Ole Thomsen dismissed him: “We’d have seen her. It’s not like we’re just idle while doing our job out there. They also made us responsible for wounded and dead animals after they cut funding for the gamekeeper.”

  He inhaled and was about to go on when Louise interrupted.

  “That was all, I think.” She thanked him and turned around to walk back to the car.

  “You’re welcome.” Big Thomsen added, “Anything to help!”

  Louise sensed that he stayed and watched them walk away.

  “Say… aren’t you the one from Lerbjerg?” he called as she was about to open the car door. “You were Klaus’s girlfriend back then?”

  She froze. And stood there, her back still to him, while struggling to compose herself before slowly turning around.

>   “I thought I recognized your name,” he enthused. “Just had to get it all lit up on the old scoreboard, you know? Do you still keep in touch with his parents?”

  Tense, and worried her voice would betray her, Louise gave a small shake of the head before quickly getting in the car.

  “WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT?” Eik asked after they had been driving for a bit.

  Louise ignored his curious look and stifled a sneeze.

  “Careful with that,” he said. “If you sneeze too hard, you could break a rib or herniate a disc, but if you try to hold it in you could burst a blood vessel in your head or your neck. And die.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Louise snapped. She hated sneezing while driving, but it wasn’t because she was worried about bursting a blood vessel. It was more about the split second of losing control while the car was going.

  They drove for a little while before he broke the silence again.

  “You know Ole Thomsen,” he concluded once they had passed through the last turns in the road and she sped back up a little.

  “Knew,” she specified dismissively.

  “When exactly did you live down here?” he asked, this time turning to look at her.

  Louise sighed but then gave in. “We moved down here the summer before fifth grade,” she said. “And I was twenty when I moved away.”

  “But you still have friends who live down here?”

  “No,” she replied quickly.

  She had just turned onto the tree-lined avenue in Lejre when he picked up the subject again. “But you had a boyfriend!”

  “Yes, but that was a long time ago.”

  Annoyed with his continued questioning, Louise hit the gas. She knew, of course, that it wasn’t going to stop him, but at least she would be busy keeping the car on the road.

  “Was his name Klaus?” Eik tried but she ignored him, suddenly remembering one late evening when she and her brother had been riding in the backseat of their parents’ old Simca. There had been an accident here on the avenue, in this exact spot. A car had collided head-on with one of the tall trees. She didn’t see much before her mother told them to get on the floor of the car and warned them not to look out the window.