by Sara Blaedel
“If you’ve got any aches or pains, you should crawl into the hole,” Eik said. He pointed to the trunk. “These old trees can heal you, and they also say that the old hollow trees can improve a woman’s fertility if she’s having trouble getting pregnant.”
“I’m not getting into any tree,” she said. She started toward the path. “Where’d you hear about that?”
He let go of her hand when they reached the path. “Those things interested me when I was a kid.”
Why did that not surprise her?
Eik held a limb back, but twigs caught and pulled at Camilla’s hair as she fought through the underbrush covering the two wheel ruts of the trail.
“Let me lead the way,” he said. He tromped through to make a path.
The dogs were already far ahead. The thick underbrush closed behind them, as if they had been swallowed.
Suddenly a clearing appeared. A gnarled tree stood in the middle, its crown spread out like a toadstool. The sun was hidden behind the forest, but the evening light cast a red sheen over everything. A low hedge grew on all four sides around the tree, making it look as if it were in the middle of a playing field.
The identical graves lay behind the unkempt hedge. They were spaced two to three meters apart. Simple and chilling. Louise froze; she felt as if she’d stepped into a world where time stood still. She began walking slowly toward Eik, who had crouched down at the first gravestone.
“Ellen Sofie Mathilde Jensen,” Eik read. “Born 1908, died 1920. Twelve years old, she was.”
Louise walked down the row of graves, reading the names and dates chiseled into the gravestones. All the girls were very young when they died, none of them over sixteen. The hairs on her arms rose, and she shook her head at herself. Then she heard Dina whining eagerly, and Charlie barked. She was familiar enough with police dogs to know that he was marking territory, and she was about to ask Eik to call him when Dina also began barking. Annoyed now, she walked over. The German shepherd was digging, growling to warn Dina away.
“Eik, damn it!” She’d already pulled a dog leash out of her pocket to hold the deaf Labrador.
“What did he find?” Eik asked. He’d taken the other way around the graves.
“I don’t know, but I do know that there are forty-two hundred-year-old corpses here, so if that’s what he’s after, there’s more than enough for him.” Louise grabbed Dina while Eik ordered Charlie to stay. “Is he hurt so bad that you can’t take him to a graveyard without him flipping out?”
“Of course not. He was a Grade One dog; only the best reach that level.” Eik sounded insulted. He was about to say more, but then he stopped. “What the hell!”
He dropped to his knees and began scraping the compact soil aside.
Louise tied Dina to a tree. “What did he find?” she yelled, running over to him.
“A body.”
Charlie had dug a small trench, and now he lay beside it and looked at them attentively.
Eik’s voice was dark—the warmth that she had heard before had vanished. Carefully he pushed a bit more of the dirt aside. “This is no child’s hand,” he said, “and it hasn’t been here a hundred years.”
Louise felt a chill. Eik had uncovered a pale white hand. From the swollen tissue and waxy film over the skin, she knew it was utterly impossible that it been buried since the early 1900s.
Her heart hammered as she squatted beside him. Eik scraped a bit more earth away to reveal the arm. The corpse wasn’t fresh; several places showed only bone and sinew.
She looked at the gravestone. “Klara Sofie Erna Hermansen. Born 1916, died 1918.”
They sat there for a moment. Louise leaned against Eik’s knee as she studied the skin left on the upper arm. She was about to stand up when he grabbed her and pointed. He swiped more of the dirt away, and she saw that some of the fingers were intact. A gold ring, much too big, adorned one of them.
“Female?” he guessed. He stood and wiped his hands on his pants. “Or a teenager. Not a grown man, anyway.”
“It’s hard to say,” Louise answered as she rose up from her knees. “It may have been lying here a long time. The clothes are almost rotted away.”
Dark scraps of material were scattered around the ground, as if a sleeve had slowly deteriorated.
“My guess is five, maybe ten years,” Eik said. He walked off to smoke a cigarette, while Louise found Frederik’s number on her phone. “The grave is shallow.”
“I don’t think it’s a grave,” she said. She measured the distance from the body to the top of the ground. “Someone has tried to hide a body.”
* * *
“Couldn’t you find it?” Frederik asked when Louise called.
“We found it, all right,” Louise said. She didn’t know how to begin. “We found a body out here that’s not from the girls’ orphanage.”
After several seconds Frederik asked, “What do you mean?”
“It looks like someone has been buried on top of one of the old graves.”
She told him about Charlie sniffing it out. “The body is about half a meter down, far enough so the animals haven’t dug it up.”
“Couldn’t it be an animal?”
She could hear he was shaken. “No, it’s human, no doubt about that.” She said the Roskilde Police would definitely want to speak with him.
“I’d better come right now,” he said.
Louise heard gravel crunching; he was already on his way. “Can you make sure the police have someplace to enter the forest? And there’s no reason to tell Jonas and Markus about this until tomorrow morning, let’s not get them all excited tonight.”
Frederik agreed, and he promised to have Tønnesen take down the chain blocking the road.
“Tell the police to drive in at the forest parking lot and I’ll meet them. But won’t they want to wait until tomorrow, when they can see?”
“They’ll definitely come immediately,” Louise said, nodding at Eik, who was signaling to her that he’d call Mid- and West Zealand Police in Roskilde. Meanwhile she explained to Frederik that a team of technicians would come in addition to the police, even though it was already getting dark.
“They’ll probably have the Emergency Management Agency put a tent over the grave, then they’ll set up floodlights,” Louise said, adding that of course a forensic pathologist would be there to look at the body before it was carefully dug up and taken in to be examined.
* * *
Ten minutes later Frederik trotted out of the forest. He stopped for a moment to get his bearings in the near-darkness of the summer night, then hurried over to them.
Louise tried to stop him in time, but he got close enough to see the arm sticking out of the ground.
“My God!” He stared at the ground, his hand over his mouth. He shook his head. “How could something like this happen?”
He seemed uncertain of where to go. “Who would do something like this? Hiding a body in our forest?”
He backed off a bit, still staring at the arm in the ground.
You’d be surprised at the things people can do, Louise thought, but she didn’t say it. He was shaken up enough already.
“That’s probably one of the things the police will ask you,” she said. “Is the forest open to the public?”
Frederik nodded. Finally he tore his eyes away. “It’s a private forest, and we have NO VEHICLES ALLOWED signs up, but we’ve just seen that some people ignore them.”
Eik’s phone rang. He nodded crisply at Frederik. “They’ll be here soon. You’ll show them the way?” He walked off to take the call.
When Frederik left, Eik came back and put his arm around Louise’s shoulder. “We better take the dogs back, so they don’t cause so much commotion when the police arrive.”
She’d untied Dina from the tree and was now holding her leash, but it seemed as if the yellow Lab had lost interest in the corpse. Charlie still lay where Eik had left him. The big German shepherd didn’t budge, even though Dina egged
him on to play.
Louise shook herself. In a few minutes the evening quiet of the forest would be transformed into a crime scene, and all the relevant investigations would begin. More people would show up, and the floodlights would blaze coldly down onto the old graves of the girls. She thought about the boy hiding somewhere out there. Maybe he’d left the area, but if not, the lights might flush him out. Or frighten him to death.
20
What the hell kind of place is this?” Nymand yelled after he’d stepped out of the car and peered down the rows of identical gravestones.
“It’s a private graveyard from back when the old orphanage owned the forest,” Louise explained. She led Roskilde’s deputy commissioner to the body.
Nymand had headed the investigation when Frederik’s young niece had been kidnapped; it was the beginning of a family tragedy. She hadn’t spoken to him since, but she caught something in his eye that told her he knew about the episode at the gamekeeper’s.
“It’ll be half an hour or so before emergency and the techs arrive,” he said. Meanwhile he wanted to know how they’d found the body.
Eik stood a few meters away, lighting a cigarette. “It was the dog; he started digging. But Charlie is experienced—he knows when to stop.” Eik sounded a bit proud as he stuck the pack of cigarettes in his pocket and blew smoke out.
“In other words, he ruined the crime scene,” Nymand stated sullenly. “Why the hell isn’t that dog leashed?”
Louise was afraid that her partner would lock horns with Nymand. Criticizing Eik’s new best friend wasn’t the way to get on his good side; she’d found that out. But he merely tilted his head.
“If the dog had been on a leash, there’d be no crime scene,” he said drily. “And if you walk over and look at the grave, you’ll see that he only dug down to the hand. I’m the one who uncovered the arm, and we haven’t touched the rest of the grave.”
Nymand grunted.
“Charlie’s a police dog, not an amateur,” Eik continued. Louise had to look away to keep herself from smiling.
“There’s probably not much left that can help us anyway,” the deputy commissioner admitted. He joined his men.
Louise followed and asked if there was anything more they needed to know before she and Eik took the dogs back to the manor house.
Nymand shook his head. “But we need to talk to Frederik.” He looked over at Camilla’s husband, standing in the background with his hands in his pockets.
“You might get more out of talking to his manager,” Louise said. “Tønnesen has been around for decades. Frederik has only lived here the last twenty years.”
“It’s possible we’ll wait to search the area until early tomorrow,” Nymand said, as if he hadn’t heard her.
Louise nodded and looked toward the grave.
“But of course we’ll secure the crime scene right now,” he continued, “and take the remains in to Forensics when the techs finish tomorrow.” He gazed around. “We probably should cordon off the area.”
From whom? Louise thought. She told him that she was staying with Camilla that weekend, and she mentioned the hit-and-run and the missing boy seen in the forest.
“Frederik,” Nymand called out, ignoring her. “Can we talk in the morning?”
“I can stay out here. I’d like to help if I can.”
Nymand shook his head violently. Clearly he didn’t want any outsiders contaminating the crime scene. “Go on. I’ll call if I need you.”
Louise noticed that Frederik hesitated.
“We’re taking the dogs back,” Eik yelled. “Drive on ahead and grab a few beers. I could sure use one, anyway.”
* * *
Camilla lay sleeping on the sofa when they returned. Out in the kitchen, it was obvious that the boys had made toasted sandwiches. Sliced bread, ham, and cheese were scattered around the counter beside the big toaster oven, which smelled of melted cheese. The two boys flew down the stairs.
“Where’ve you been?” Markus called before he had even reached the kitchen.
Louise and Frederik glanced at each other. They had agreed to tell the boys what had happened, but without making a big deal about it.
“Eik and Louise found a dead person out in the forest,” Frederik began.
“Possibly someone who took their own life.” Louise lied to make it sound less dramatic, but she could see it didn’t work. “The police are there, and we really don’t know much yet.”
“So maybe there’s a murderer in the forest?” Markus asked, his eyes wide as he looked from Eik to Louise to Frederik.
“But it is a murder, right?” Jonah said.
She spread her hands in exasperation. “Boys, it’s way too early to be certain of anything. But yes, it’s possible that someone hid a body out in the forest. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the person was killed here.”
Jonas’s shoulders slumped; Markus gave the chair in front of him a push, the legs stuttering across the floor. Obviously, both of them were uneasy with what they’d heard.
“Could it have something to do with what happened to Mom?” Markus asked.
Louise quickly shook her head. “No, definitely not.” She walked over and put her arm around his shoulder, stroking his hair lightly. “This probably happened years ago. Long before you moved here. And nobody can say this is where it happened.”
Everyone seemed to take in what had been said.
“Can we take the big bottle of cola up with us?” Markus asked Frederik. With that, the boys’ moods lifted, as if the corpse no longer had anything to do with them.
Louise smiled when they grabbed two glasses out of the cupboard and hit Frederik up for the bag of chips on the top shelf.
“Is there anything you’d like?” he asked after the boys had gone back upstairs. “You hungry?”
Louise shook her head and suggested they make a few liver pâté sandwiches. She felt a bit dizzy, so she sat down while Frederik rounded everything up.
First the session with Bitten, Thomsen threatening her, ordering her to stay away. Then Camilla being run down in the forest. And now this. Thoughts swirled in her head. After a few bites, she pushed her plate away. “I think I’ll lie down,” she said, even though it was only a few minutes past eleven. “Are you going back to town?” She looked at Eik.
Frederik quickly intervened. “You’re welcome to stay. It might be best, if the police need both of you.”
Eik needed no encouragement. “Great. I just need to find out what to do about feeding the dog. I’m not nearly as well organized as Jonas, who brought along a doggy bag for Dina.”
Frederik pointed to the refrigerator. “We have steaks in there, so if Charlie isn’t a vegetarian, you’re welcome to give them to him.”
* * *
Louise had her own bureau drawer in the guest room, with everything she needed for an unexpected visit. Camilla had arranged it—she felt obligated to do so, since she had moved out on her friend in Frederiksberg.
The only time Louise had slept with Eik had been in this guest room, the night after Camilla and Frederik’s wedding. They drank tons of champagne and kissed for the first time. Louise had no idea how she had gotten up the stairs and into bed, but now she suddenly remembered every second of that night with him, the feel of his skin, the stubble on his face, his hands.
In the bathroom, the thought of his caresses aroused her. She rinsed her face off when she heard him come up the steps and walk into the guest room.
Eik had confided in her that night. He told her about the woman he had lost, about sailing with her and two friends in the Mediterranean during his vacation, then quarreling with her outside Rome. He’d left the boat and returned to Copenhagen, where he heard about the accident. Sailors had found their rented boat drifting around a small harbor. Their two friends had drowned, but his girlfriend had disappeared without a trace. No one had seen her since. It had left a black hole inside Eik, into which he sometimes fell. Once in a while it was hard to pull himsel
f out of it.
Eik knocked on the bathroom door. “Are you okay in there?”
Louise turned off the water. “I’m coming,” she said, and dried her face.
21
Louise had been awake for a while when her phone rang. She hadn’t had much sleep. She felt ashamed. Eik had been very understanding when, in the middle of all the warmth and fondling, she suddenly had rolled up into a ball and begun crying. Much later, when the tears stopped, she told him the rest of the story. About the sorrow and shame she had been living with her entire life. He stroked her back as she talked about Thomsen and his gang, who’d kept their claws in Klaus even though he wanted out.
At one point in the night, she turned to him and slid her hand over his chest, down over his prominent ribs, his hip bone, his groin, but when she felt him growing and stiffening, images from the gamekeeper’s barn entered her head. She turned away from him.
“Don’t you think you should speak with someone about what happened?” he’d whispered.
Louise had in fact considered making an appointment with a crisis counselor; Jakobsen was his name. Homicide had been using him for several years, and she’d gone to him before. She knew Eik was right, and she decided to contact Jakobsen, but first she was going to find the boy. And also get to the bottom of what happened the night Klaus died.
She reached down to the floor and picked up her buzzing phone.
“There’s an old woman standing here. She’s in our way, and I can’t get hold of Frederik Sachs-Smith,” Nymand said without introduction. “You’re going to have to get her out of here.”
Louise sat up. It was almost seven thirty; she must have gotten some sleep after all. “Where are you?” Eik stirred.
“Out at the graves of the girls. You did find a body out here yesterday evening, presumably a woman, and now we have to fine-comb the entire area. We can’t have this woman hanging around in the middle of it all.”
