by Sara Blaedel
“Christ,” Louise whispered.
A car outside drove up to the house.
“Find Sune.” Jane gripped Louise’s arm. “Find him before they do.”
* * *
Louise had almost reached the kitchen when the front door opened. The butcher walked in.
“Are you going to tell us what happened out in the forest, the night Sune disappeared?” she snarled. She walked up to him. “Your son isn’t home.”
“We take care of our own. We never asked you to butt in.” The butcher’s face was expressionless.
“You lied to us,” Louise said. “That’s bad enough. But you’re also withholding information from the police, and I intend to press charges if you don’t start cooperating.”
His face hardened, but she didn’t stop. “And if we find out that you or your friends are connected with the murder of the young prostitute we just dug up in the forest, I’m going after you and I’m going to put you away. For a long, long, long time. Do you understand?”
Louise knew there could be trouble if the butcher had the smarts to complain that the police had threatened him. It was a small risk to take, she thought. And worth it.
27
We have to find that boy, and now,” Louise said, back in the car with Eik. “If Sune saw Thomsen and his gang kill Lisa Maria, they’re going to stop him from talking.”
“What kind of a father is this butcher?” Eik said. She’d never heard him so angry before. He drove way too fast down the narrow gravel driveway; Louise put a hand on his arm to calm him down. He seemed to be channeling all his anger through the gas pedal, and he didn’t slow down until he rammed his head against the roof of the car after hitting a pothole. “You just can’t treat your child that way.”
“You’re right.” Louise said. “This is how people behave when they get involved with Ole Thomsen. He and his buddies have their own rules, and unfortunately too many people get tangled up in them.”
She’d never heard about the brotherhood, but she wasn’t surprised. Especially after Klaus’s parents telling her about the janitor and Gudrun. They covered up for each other; they always had. She couldn’t care less what they called themselves, but she wasn’t going to let them get away with forcing a fifteen-year-old boy into this sick form of solidarity.
“Pull over; let’s wait until we know where we’re going.”
Before he got out of the car for a cigarette and to let Charlie run, she was calling Nymand to make sure he was organizing the search for Sune. “I believe a group of men from around Hvalsø murdered the prostitute,” Louise said. She explained that the boy had likely witnessed the killing. “And I suspect that they’re looking for him, because he’s a witness and can testify against them. We have to protect him.” When Nymand asked why she suspected all this, she told him about the initiation the night the prostitute disappeared. “If they can’t be directly tied to the murder, we at least need to talk to them. They were in the area at that time.”
Nymand cleared his throat. “There’s nothing in the preliminary results from Forensics that points to her being killed in the forest. I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait.”
“Shit!” Louise tried to calm herself down, realizing she might be pushing things because she was burning to get Big Thomsen. “Okay. But for your own sake, make sure the techs have a look at the clearing behind the girls’ graves. There’s a bonfire site, and a big oak with a partially hollow trunk. Let’s talk again when they’ve examined the area.”
Louise knew how that sounded; she was telling him how to employ his personnel, when she had absolutely nothing to do with his murder investigation. But she had to take a chance.
“Eik and I are going to talk to four of the men who were there that night.”
“Oh no you’re not!” Nymand yelled. Louise held her phone away from her ear. “If you think these specific men could be involved in the murder, my people will talk to them.”
“These specific men are involved in my investigation,” she answered. “They may have something to do with the murder.”
She knew it would be a feather in his cap if he could tell the media that the police already had carried out the first interrogations in the murder case. So she gave him the four names and said they had spoken with the boy’s parents. She promised to send him the report on what Jane had told them as soon as she’d written it.
“We’re very close to where two of the men live. We’ll take care of them, but the last man lives out in Kirke Såby.”
Camilla had told her that. Otherwise, she’d had no contact with the mason since she’d left Hvalsø.
“Put the screws to him,” she said. She explained that Lars Hemmingsen had admitted to his wife that he and his friends hired a prostitute once a year for a fertility ritual in the forest. “In other words, they gang-bang her to honor Freya.”
Nymand had no more to say.
* * *
“Turn to the right up here,” she said.
“Where do we start?”
“Thomsen, in Skov Hastrup. And if it turns out he’s moved in permanently with Bitten, we’ll have to take a drive into the forest.”
Louise was surprised to realize that she suddenly looked forward to confronting her old demons. She was ready.
“I think we should keep Jane out of this,” she said when they were close to Thomsen’s house. “Let’s hear what they have to say about the initiation rites. This won’t take long. I just want to see their reactions when we tell them we know about their brotherhood. When we’re finished here, we’re going to Holbæk.”
She saw that Eik wanted to know more, but he just nodded.
* * *
They turned off the highway and drove down a small road with broad ditches. Thomsen’s whitewashed farmhouse appeared just after a short curve, and immediately she spotted his Toyota Land Cruiser parked close to the house, beside an old black Mercedes.
They drove in and parked. Big Thomsen and a gray-haired man were walking around out by the woodpile behind the house. She recognized the old police chief, dressed in blue coveralls and holding a chain saw.
“Damn it!” she said. “His father’s here. Thomsen won’t tell us anything.”
As if he would have anyway! she thought.
Before she was even out of the car, Thomsen and his father were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, their arms crossed. They watched their visitors without a word, but when Louise and Eik began walking across the gravel parking lot, Roed Thomsen stepped forward.
They did nothing Louise could characterize as threatening, but it would be hard to look more contemptuous. Despite that, she tried to sound friendly when she said they were happy to find Thomsen at home. She didn’t offer her hand; she knew instinctively he would ignore it.
“We’d like to talk to you about Sune’s initiation. We understand you were both there that evening. Of course, you know that the boy hasn’t been seen since.”
Slowly, old Roed Thomsen turned his head and looked at his son. Big Thomsen was leaning back slightly; he appeared to be looking down at Louise. “That was a private affair,” he said.
“We’d like to hear what happened anyway,” she said. She refused to be provoked. She looked him in the eye without blinking.
For a moment he seemed to be weighing his words, but then he shook his head. “We celebrated the boy’s birthday and partied,” he said. “His father brought along some good cuts from his shop, and we drank some beer.”
Eik stepped forward. He was a big-city cop in a black leather jacket and just as tall as Ole Thomsen. He lit a cigarette in Thomsen’s face and threw the match down on his property. The fat man in overalls struggled to maintain his contempt.
“What are these rituals actually like, to get into your brotherhood?” Eik blew smoke toward the two men. “We know about the oath ring, and the business about pledging loyalty. And silence.”
Louise could have killed Eik. He was talking too much. He needed to stop.
“
But what about the test of manhood? How to prove your courage.”
Now it was Eik leaning his head back, looking down at Big Thomsen, who glanced over at his father.
The old police chief laughed drily. “Boys nowadays don’t have any guts. Might be that school softens them up; it’s not like it was back when I grew up.” He asked Eik what sort of test of manhood he was talking about.
A muscle quivered under Big Thomsen’s eye, but he kept his mouth shut.
“You met out in the forest,” Eik said, unruffled by the elder Thomsen. “And made a sacrifice, I’m assuming.”
“How much do you really know about all this?”
Roed Thompson had taken over now. Even if Louise hadn’t known the old man, she would have seen that he was used to doing the talking. He did the questioning; other people didn’t question him.
“Not a whole lot,” Eik answered calmly. “I messed around with stuff like that when I was a kid.”
“It’s not something you mess around with!” Big Thomsen snorted. He gave Eik the evil eye and stepped forward. “The Church Ministry recognized Asatro as a religion ten years ago, so don’t you come here with your disrespect and mock us.”
“We’re not intending to disrespect anybody,” Eik said. He flipped his cigarette in an arc. It landed beside the Land Cruiser’s left front tire.
“Why should I stand here and tell you about something you don’t even take seriously?” Big Thomsen continued, his voice full of scorn.
“Because we’ve found the body of a young woman who disappeared the night you had your fun in the forest. And because we’re interested in what happened.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Big Thomsen said.
“Right now, the area is being fine-combed. Every leaf is being turned over, and you can be absolutely sure we’re going to find out if there’s the slightest connection between your little party and her death.” Eik nodded at him to emphasize his point.
“You still have no right to come in here and accuse us, just because our beliefs come from nature, not the church,” Roed Thomsen spat out at him.
His hands were in the pockets of his coveralls and his chest was puffed out—it wasn’t hard to see where his son got his attitude from, Louise thought.
Eik stepped back. “We’re not accusing anyone of anything,” he said. “We’re just asking you to describe what you do. The rituals when you make sacrifices.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave my son’s property now, or else I’ll sue you for slander,” the old police chief said. He waved them back to their car.
“Don’t worry, I think we’ve got enough,” Louise said, looking at Big Thomsen. “We need to get to Holbæk anyway, to talk to René. Shall I tell him hello for you?”
She enjoyed seeing the marine-blue irises of his eyes turn black with anger. They both knew he had no chance to coach René about what and what not to say.
28
What the hell happened back there?” Eik asked. He rolled the window down and lit another cigarette.
Louise was about to complain, but she let it go. She craved a cigarette, too. It wasn’t so much what the two men had said as it was the mood. As if she and Eik had rammed into a wall.
“Welcome to Hvalsø,” she said sadly, though she knew she wasn’t being fair to the rest of the town. “Where the best defense is a good offense.”
It had always been that way, she thought. It was protection, though it took some time to learn how to use it. Back when she was in school, after she got a horse, her father had started a dung heap on the other side of the road. Before long, a man from Lerbjerg began complaining. And he wasn’t even their closest neighbor. But by that time, her father had learned how the game was played; he told the man that there were lots of things you could talk about. Like how someone had run a line from their septic tank to the district’s drainage pipe, how piss and shit ran out into the nearby stream. After that, her father heard no complaints about the dung heap.
“It’s really incredible,” she said. She laughed as she remembered more of her father’s favorite stories.
“What is?” Eik said.
“When my parents bought the farm out by Lerbjerg, there were grain fields on both sides of the road, and of course they had to be harvested. My dad had never done it before. He came from Copenhagen; he knew zero about these things, so he hired one of the neighbors who owned a combine. The neighbor did the cutting, Dad stood up on the machine and tied off sacks of grain and tossed them to the ground. After that, they were supposed to be turned regularly so the grain wouldn’t rot.”
“That must’ve been a long time ago,” Eik said, even though she was sure he knew nothing about farming.
“Every time Dad went out to turn the sacks, our neighbor sat down outside his house with a cup of coffee, enjoying the sight of this big-city slicker wrestling fifty-kilo sacks of grain. Of course, the neighbor wouldn’t dream of helping, but he wasn’t shy about showing how entertaining it was to watch Dad sweat. That’s how ‘foreigners’ were treated. It’s probably different now, with all the young families from the city moving out here, but looking down on others has always been part of the mentality. Pussy lives right up here.” Louise pointed to the church on top of the hill.
John Knudsen had taken over his parents’ farm in Særløse. He’d been in the same class as Big Thomsen, and his unfortunate school nickname had stuck with him. At least as far as Louise knew.
Eik turned off and drove along the churchyard, down a narrow gravel road—two ruts separated by tall grass that rustled against the car’s undercarriage. The road ended at a ramshackle farmhouse with a big barn. The barn door was a torn green tarp. The Knudsen family farm had gone downhill, she noticed. She’d passed by here almost every day when she was a kid, to catch the school bus.
It was the complete opposite of Thomsen’s farm, where everything was kept up. Almost too well—Louise suspected that he coerced Hvalsø’s plumbers, carpenters, and other workmen to moonlight for him. It wasn’t hard to imagine they owed him favors, which they paid back by working on his house.
Chickens ran around Pussy’s farmyard, pecking between the cobblestones, while two kids poured sand out of a red plastic bucket in front of the kitchen steps.
“Park out here,” Louise said. She looked around. A stocky woman in tights with a cigarette hanging from her mouth stood waiting outside on the steps. Another small child clung to her legs, trying to drag her back into the house.
Eik was already out of the car. He said hello to Knudsen’s wife, who nodded and pointed toward the barn behind the house. Louise didn’t recognize the woman, though it could be because of weight she’d put on from all the pregnancies.
Louise walked over and held out her hand. Now she was sure she’d never seen the woman before. “He’s over in the barn, drowning some newborn kittens,” his wife said. She made it sound as if it was something he did all the time. “But he has to pick up our oldest; she goes to gymnastics. He’ll be along in a minute.”
A gray tabby came meowing out of the house, but Pussy’s wife shoved it gently back inside with her foot before shutting the door. The young child still hung on to her.
“How many children do you have?” Eik asked. He peered over at the two in the sandbox.
“Four,” she said. She laid a hand on her stomach. “There’s another on the way. But not until Christmas.”
Eik smiled and offered his congratulations, while Louise thought about the cigarette the woman had been smoking when they arrived. The two kids in the sandbox shouted, and one of the boys began crying. The other started packing a pile of sand that looked like a steep mountain.
“They’re burying a mouse. Tjalfe wanted a real bonfire for the body, but their father won’t let them start fires when he’s not around.”
“That’s a great name,” Eik said. “Are they all named after someone in Nordic mythology?”
“Would be if it was up to my husband,” the woman said. She s
miled broadly, two deep dimples coming into sight. “They’d be called Odin, Thor, and Loke, but I put my foot down.”
Eik nodded. He said that his sister had a daughter named Sigrun.
Louise didn’t even know he had a sister. In fact, she didn’t know much about his childhood, except that once he’d mentioned he grew up in Hillerød and that he had moved out at seventeen.
They heard footsteps. Two kids shouted, “Dad!”
John Knudsen’s hair had turned gray. It lay plastered on his head; he looked exactly like his father, who had always stood and waved at his son as the school bus drove away.
He turned his attention to his children, praising their grave mound before walking over to Louise and Eik. He recognized her at once, she noted, nodding shortly to her before shaking Eik’s hand. He wasn’t hostile toward them like the Thomsens had been, but he wasn’t particularly friendly, either.
“You can go on back inside,” he said to his wife. “I’ll only be a minute.”
“Good-bye,” she said, smiling at them. Her dimples deepened when Eik promised they wouldn’t be long.
When she closed the door behind her, Knudsen said he knew why they were there. Thomsen had called.
Louise regretted that they hadn’t immediately gone over to the barn.
“I don’t have anything to tell you about that evening,” he said in his broad mid-Zealand accent. “What is it you want to know, anyway?”
“We just want to know what happened,” Louise said. “What scared Sune so badly that he didn’t dare return home?”
Pussy laughed. “Oh, that; I can tell you that! That kid gets scared when someone farts. One of the boys probably let one rip.”
Louise was furious, but Eik reacted first. Knudsen was still grinning when Eik grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the wall. “Let’s hear about the young prostitute. The one you forced out into the forest,” he hissed.
