The Killing Forest

by Sara Blaedel

  She tried to smile at him; she wanted to say something, but her mind went blank. Over twenty years had gone by without them hearing a single peep from her. Not that she’d heard from them, either. Finally her feet moved, and before she knew it the words flew out of her mouth.

  “I don’t think Klaus committed suicide.”

  Instantly she realized her mistake. She should have said that it was so nice to see him again; that he was looking well.

  Ernst stiffened for a second, then laid a hand on her shoulder. “Come inside. It wouldn’t surprise me if Lissy had a cup of coffee waiting for us.”

  Louise followed him around the corner of the house to the back porch, where a half-finished birdhouse stood on his workbench. They entered the house through the laundry room to the smell of newly washed clothes and freshly brewed coffee. She took off her shoes, and he led her into the kitchen. She couldn’t remember exactly how it had looked back then, yet a sense of security and familiarity overcame her. Which made it even more difficult to say what she was there to say.

  Klaus’s mother appeared in the doorway and welcomed Louise with open arms, as if she were a long-lost child come home.

  “Now, this is a surprise!” Lissy said.

  Her hair had turned gray, and her figure was rounder now, but her eyes were still lively. And she had the same habit of drying her hands on her apron. Without another word, she opened a cupboard and brought out coffee cups.

  “Do you use milk or sugar?” she asked as she walked over to the refrigerator.

  “Milk, thank you.”

  Ernst led her into the living room. At once, she noticed the photos covering the bureau, of Klaus and his younger sister. They appeared together in several shots, then a few were of an older Heidi. Alone. What looked to be the most recent showed her with a little boy on her lap.

  “Our grandchild,” Ernst said. “Jonathan. He just turned three.”

  Farthest to the left in a silver frame was a photo of her and Klaus. Her hair was tightly curled, a permanent gone wild in Salon Connie. She’d forgotten that.

  Louise managed to say that their grandson was a real cutie before her throat tightened up from the grief that revisited her. They sat in awkward silence, waiting for Lissy. The moment she stepped into the room, Ernst told her what Louise had said out on the sidewalk.

  “You don’t think it was suicide,” he repeated. “But isn’t it hard to know what happened after all these years?”

  Before Louise could explain, Lissy said, “I’ve never believed it was his own idea.” She looked at Ernst. “We’ve talked about that.”

  Ernst nodded almost imperceptibly, then stared down at his hands.

  Louise set her coffee cup down. “So what you’re saying is, you’ve known all along?”

  “Don’t think that we’ve known,” he mumbled.

  “We have our theories,” Lissy said, her voice more assured.

  “But you didn’t do anything about it?” Louise said. “You should’ve said something.”

  “No one knows for sure what happened that night,” Ernst said. “That’s why it was hard to make serious accusations. And no parent wants to think that their child took his own life.”

  “You know this town,” Lissy said. She studied the fingernails on her right hand, then looked up. “You know how it is when everyone turns against you. And it’s right what Ernst says: We didn’t know what happened. We just couldn’t make sense of it. He was so happy, all he could talk about was you two and your house. He was starting a new life, and he’d settled his debt, too.”

  “What debt?” Louise asked.

  “He owed Ole Thomsen for a motorcycle. And it turned out he even had to pay interest. It ended up being expensive, more than he could pay from what he earned as an apprentice.”

  Of course, Louise thought. Thomsen wasn’t above squeezing his friends.

  “We helped him out. We paid off Thomsen so Klaus wouldn’t have to have anything to do with him and his gang.”

  Louise hadn’t known about that, either.

  “But it’s hard to turn your back on old friends,” his father said. As if an explanation was needed for his son’s problems with leaving the gang. Louise had never understood what he had in common with them.

  Louise also didn’t understand why his parents hadn’t acted if they suspected wrongdoing. She’d never doubted that Klaus had taken his own life. The only question for her was why.

  “I’m not sure if you’ve heard what happened out at the gamekeeper’s last month,” she said.

  They both nodded. She told them what René Gamst had said just before his arrest. That someone had put the noose around Klaus’s neck.

  Several moments went by before Ernst said, “There was a bunch of them out at your house that night.”

  Louise’s skin tingled. She’d never heard how much people knew about that night, and she’d never asked. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, to have the images of Klaus’s last hours swirling around in her head.

  She’d been told about the beer drinking. Her brother had seen empty bottles on an upside-down beer case—a makeshift table Louise and Klaus ate breakfast on that first morning in their house. Klaus had spread a newspaper and set out paper plates and plastic tableware they’d bought at a gas station.

  Ernst continued. “Every one of them said that they left around one thirty that night.”

  “You can’t believe anything they say,” Lissy said, “you know that. All their explanations. It was the same way back then in Såby.”

  “Såby?” Louise said.

  “That’s something else entirely,” Ernst said.

  Lissy brushed him off. “It’s not something else, not at all. And then there was Gudrun at her store. No one believed she stumbled and fell on her way to the bathroom that night, not with those injuries. And why would she use the store’s bathroom? She had her own, right beside her bedroom.”

  Ernst clenched his hands so tightly that his rough knuckles turned white. “We don’t know anything about what happened to Gudrun. The police chief said she fell.”

  “What about everything missing from the store?” Lissy said. “The alcohol and cigarettes.”

  Louise broke in. “Wait, you’re talking about the Gudrun who ran the convenience store at the gas station; the woman who died?”

  Everyone in Hvalsø had known you could knock on Gudrun’s back door and buy beer and cigarettes at night. Louise had done it herself, several times, when they’d run out of beer at a party. Gudrun had been a sweet old lady, well-liked by everyone, and the whole town had gone into mourning after her adult daughter showed up for lunch that Sunday and found her mother on the floor in the store’s back room. At first it was rumored that she’d been beaten and robbed, but the police said there was no sign of assault. The items missing from the store had been attributed to Gudrun’s back-door business, which she’d kept off the books. Of course, that was easy to claim; she wasn’t around to dispute it. Nobody knew for sure what really happened that night.

  Lissy wouldn’t let it go. “I heard from down at the clinic that her skull had been fractured. A few ribs, too. And the injuries to her face.”

  “The police said it was bad luck how she fell; how she hit her head on the counter,” Ernst said.

  “She was beaten,” Lissy said, annoyed at her husband. “And she could hardly knock herself in the head from behind and fall on her face and crack her ribs, all at the same time. They said she must have lost consciousness right off the bat.”

  “That may be, but we still don’t know for sure.”

  “Who was in charge of the investigation?” Louise said.

  “The chief of police did the talking,” Lissy said. “I don’t know who was actually out there doing the investigating.”

  The police chief back then was Big Thomsen’s father, old Roed Thomsen. He’d retired just before Louise had finished at the police academy. He had always been well respected, was one of the town’s leaders—he probably still wa
s, Louise thought. Hadn’t he been president of the Hvalsø Sports Association? She was never around him. Her parents didn’t belong to the town’s elite. Her family would always be regarded as outsiders, no matter how long they lived there.

  “What happened out in Såby?” Louise asked.

  “The school janitor was killed by a hit-and-run driver. They never found him.”

  “For God’s sake, Lissy!” Ernst said. “There’s no reason to start in on things we don’t know about.”

  She ignored her husband. “Did you know him?”

  Louise shook her head.

  “But then you never played handball, did you?”

  “I did, yes. But I don’t remember the janitor out there.”

  “He lived in Vestre Såby with his wife and two small children. There was a handball tournament that weekend, and as I recall he left for the gym early Saturday morning to let the cleaners from Roskilde in. There’d been a dance the night before.”

  “None of this matters now,” Ernst said. He looked at Louise. “A paper boy found him in the ditch. They never did catch whoever ran him over, even though the police questioned everyone around there. The chief of police finally gave up.”

  “Of course he gave up,” Lissy said. “He knew who was out there in the middle of the night, running the intersection with their headlights off.”

  Ernst sighed. “I don’t know why you’re digging all this up.”

  “I’ll tell you why, because it’s so easy to see what goes on around here.” Suddenly Lissy sounded tired. “You’ve always been afraid of the bigwigs in this town; you’d rather just shut your eyes. But I’m not going to keep quiet anymore, not about anyone who might have been involved in Klaus’s death. And that’s that! Not after hearing this from Louise.”

  Chills ran down Louise’s spine. Her joints suddenly felt stiff and sore, as if she’d been sitting motionless too long. But she couldn’t move. “Who drove around at night with their headlights off?” She looked back and forth between Klaus’s parents, though she felt she already knew the answer.

  Lissy avoided her eyes, and Ernst folded his hands in his lap again, perhaps considering her question. Finally he looked at her. “Thomsen and his crowd. Klaus was with them the night the janitor died.” He didn’t look away this time, as if he wanted to show her that he realized he’d let the cat out of the bag.

  Louise opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “They shut their lights off and crossed the intersection,” Lissy said quietly.

  “It was a sort of test of their manhood,” Ernst said.

  Louise was familiar with the Såby intersection. When you crossed the highway to Holbæk, the road continued on to Torkilstrup. A large building blocked the view on the left side of the road, and if you didn’t stop at the intersection, you couldn’t see traffic coming from Roskilde. A gas station on the other side of the highway made it difficult to see cars coming from Holbæk.

  “They didn’t stop, they just hoped there weren’t any cars,” Louise said to no one in particular.

  “When it happened, Klaus didn’t say anything about being out there that night,” Ernst said. “Later, he talked about it, but he claimed he hadn’t seen anything. I told the chief of police what these kids were up to, but he said they had nothing to do with the accident. Monkey business, as he put it, is a lot different from killing a man. He also said the janitor was thought to have been drunk, and the question was whether he’d even been hit by a car.”

  “And two days later you got sacked at the sawmill,” Lissy said. Ernst nodded.

  She looked at Louise. “That’s how things are done here. You must know that. The chief of police plays poker with the owner of the sawmill.”

  “Yeah, but I got my job back,” Ernst said.

  Lissy nodded. “You did. After he was sure you weren’t going to raise a fuss.”

  “We don’t know that,” he said, shaking his head at her. “That’s why you’re better off keeping your suspicions to yourself. We don’t know anything. We’re guessing.”

  “No,” his wife said. “We’re putting two and two together; that’s something else entirely.”

  “We won’t know anything unless one of them starts talking,” Ernst said. “And none of them will. They don’t dare.”

  Lissy folded her hands in her lap and slumped in her chair. Louise felt she had to say something. That she had reopened old wounds, and what for? For her own sake. She leaned forward.

  “If you’re talking about Big Thomsen and his crowd, I promise I’ll do everything in my power to get René Gamst to talk. And if there’s anything we don’t know about Klaus’s death, I will dig it up.”

  She got up and gave both of them a hug.

  * * *

  Five minutes later Louise stood out on Skovvej, trying to remember precisely what she had told Klaus’s parents she would do. All she could think of was the trail of death Big Thomsen’s gang seemed to leave behind them. A shadowy and vague trail. Her teeth were chattering, even though the June sun still stood high in the sky.

  She headed to the station to take the train back to Copenhagen, but the thought of walking down the main street of town exhausted her. Instead she began walking toward the old sports complex.

  Why had he never told her about the debt? Louise formed the words on her lips: Klaus owed money to Thomsen. A debt she’d known nothing about, but which hung around even after he’d paid it off.

  She stopped and closed her eyes for a moment, imagining the old farmhouse out in Kisserup. The rafters under the ceiling, the doorways that Klaus had to duck his head to get through.

  How many had there been in the house that night?

  Feeling weak in the knees, she dragged herself over to a boulder at the end of the street and sat down.

  The images kept popping up. She knew she should be focusing on the missing boy, because there was nothing she wanted more than to see Jane reunited with her son. The smartest thing by far to do right now was to take the train back to the city. To Eik.

  She snatched up her bag and was about to loop it over her shoulder when she realized that all this wasn’t about her sorrow and shattered emotions. An anger was building up inside her, so black that she had to do something about it.

  She made her decision. She would find Jane’s son, but if anyone had been involved in Klaus’s death, she would find them, too.

  12

  Camilla turned onto Skovvej and immediately slowed down. Even at this distance, she recognized her friend sitting on a boulder, her long, black hair whipping in the wind.

  “It’s so good to see you again!” she said when Louise got in the car. “Can you spend the night with us?”

  Camilla had been surprised when her friend had called, wanting to know if she could pick her up in Hvalsø. Frederik had gone to Copenhagen—he was bringing dinner back—and she had just sat down to work on an article due the next day.

  She had covered a pony show at the Roskilde Riding Club that weekend. Her former editor at Morgenavisen, Terkel Høyer, would die laughing if he knew what she was writing about as a freelancer. And when Louise called, she decided that the piece wouldn’t suffer one bit if she waited until early the next morning to write it.

  She turned the car around in a neatly kept driveway to head back to Roskilde.

  “Would you mind driving me to Holbæk?” Louise asked.

  “Holbæk! What on earth for?”

  “I need to stop by the jail.”

  “The jail! Why?” She drove down the main street and under the viaduct. Louise didn’t answer.

  “An interrogation?” Camilla asked. Still no answer. She was used to this; she had covered crime for Morgenavisen while Louise had been in Homicide. Some things they couldn’t talk about.

  But Louise turned to her and told her about visiting Klaus’s parents and what René had said to her at the gamekeeper’s.

  “Honestly, Louise!” Camilla said. “He might have just been throwing that out at you.�
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  She was dismayed that her friend had told all that to Klaus’s parents without knowing whether it was true or not. It also hurt that Louise had clammed up after the episode at the gamekeeper’s, only now telling her what had happened.

  “I don’t think so,” Louise said, her voice small.

  “He might’ve wanted to hurt you.” Something in her friend’s voice made Camilla want to put an arm around her shoulder. She glanced over at her, but Louise kept staring down at her phone.

  “Can you even get in to see him at this time of day?” Camilla wondered if the assault had thrown her friend’s thinking out of whack.

  “Mik gave me the green light to talk to him about a boy who’s been missing for a while. He’s been hiding in your forest, as a matter of fact.”

  “What in the world does he have to do with a missing boy?” Suddenly she realized Louise must be talking about the boy she’d seen. She thought about his wet hair, how he’d run off.

  “Nothing,” Louise answered. “But the boy’s father is visiting René tomorrow, so if I’m going to find out whether the family has problems, I need to talk to René now.”

  “And while you’re at it, you’ll pressure him to tell you what happened back then,” Camilla said, nodding. This was more like the Louise she knew.

  “I’m going to give it a shot,” Louise admitted.

  “What about this boy?” Camilla turned off the freeway. “How is this all connected with those men from Hvalsø?”

  “It’s the butcher’s son. You don’t seem all that surprised to hear that he’s been hiding in your forest. Don’t tell me you’ve seen him.”

  Camilla nodded. “But he ran off before I could talk to him. Is he mixed up in something?”

  Louise shook her head. “I don’t think so, but he might be emotionally unstable. His mother is dying; he’s had a difficult time handling that. He’s been very unhappy for a long time. Anyway, he ran off. How did he seem to you?”

  Camilla tried to recall how the lanky boy looked. “Pretty ragged, I’d say. It was raining and he was obviously cold. I thought something was wrong. I even thought about calling the police in Roskilde, but then I got distracted by what happened with all that blood.”