The Killing Forest

by Sara Blaedel

  “You argued with the boy’s father out in the forest,” Eik stated.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But in case you don’t know, the boy’s mother is very sick, and don’t you suppose she’d like to see her son before she kicks the bucket?”

  Louise’s fists were clenched; she was two seconds away from jumping all over Big Thomsen, but Eik held his hand up to stop her. For a moment she quivered in anger, but then she turned on her heel and strode over to the barn wing of the farmhouse.

  “That boy needs a whipping, the way he’s making his mother suffer…”

  That’s all Louise heard before entering the darkness of the barn. Long ago, animals had probably been kept in there, pigs or cattle, maybe chickens. The ceilings were low, and tall bricked-up steps divided the three rooms. It smelled dusty and sour from the moldy walls. Only the middle room looked to be in use.

  She walked over to the discarded furniture and junk piled up on the floor. Against the wall stood a packing box filled with porcelain and an old trunk, its lid missing.

  But there was no sign of the boy, not there or in the two other empty rooms, their windowpanes too gray from dirt and cobwebs for the sunshine outside to penetrate.

  Eik and Big Thomsen were gone when she walked outside, and the door to the middle wing where Thomsen lived was closed. She hurried over to another wing. Its inner walls had been torn down, and it smelled like dried grass and motor oil: a garden tractor big enough for a city park dominated the middle of the room. A sheet of plywood covered with black outlines of various tools hung on the end wall. Hammers, saws, squares. For a moment she was impressed with the level of organization, in contrast with the mess Thomsen had made at Bitten’s house.

  Outside, she looked at the gables for a way to get up into the lofts of the two wings. She spotted a black wooden hatch door on the one gable, flush with the wall, its latch covered with as many cobwebs as the windows below. It hadn’t been opened for ages.

  She walked over to the middle-wing residence. Through the window, she noticed Thomsen gesturing at Eik, as if he was emphasizing a point. Coats and raincoats hung on one wall of the hall; shelving covered the other side. On the wall beside the door was a small faucet with a short hose attached, hanging over a drain. Her parents had something similar, a place to rinse footwear. She wiped off her rubber boots and walked into the living room, where Big Thomsen was yelling.

  “I slept with my girlfriend last night. Can’t you get that through your head? I was there all night—just ask her!”

  Eik nodded calmly as Louise began a systematic search of the house. A large, black leather corner sofa had been pushed into the nook beside the porch door. Pictures hung on the walls, and on the buffet sat a large glass plate. A very expensive plate, Louise thought. This was no bachelor pad; she’d expected to see a billiard table or a dartboard. The kitchen had a large refrigerator with a freezer compartment below, an ice cube dispenser above. She checked the bedroom with attached bath, the two guest rooms on the other side of the hall. Still no boy. And the bedspreads were smooth, everything appeared to be in its place, with no sign of anyone having been there recently.

  Louise peeked into Thomsen’s bedroom. A framed photo of his parents stood on a chest of drawers. His father was as she remembered him, back when he was police chief of Roskilde. They’d called his mother Mrs. Police Chief. Louise knew her as the woman behind the counter at the bank, long before Unibank became Nordea.

  Strange how these small flashes of memory popped up, she thought, as she looked at a photo of Ole Thomsen as a schoolboy. Broad face, thick hair, with happy eyes and a light smile. His arm was around a young girl. Louise had forgotten that he’d been good looking back then.

  Right after they’d moved to Lerbjerg, when she started at Hvalsø School, he was one of the boys she watched during recesses. She couldn’t remember when his charm had disappeared, when whatever he was now had taken over.

  “Fine, we’ll all go see her,” she heard Eik say from the living room. Someone began walking. “Stop right there,” Eik shouted. “Hand over your phone. No calls until we’ve spoken with Bitten Gamst.”

  Louise stood out in the hall and waited while they put their shoes on. Then she glanced into his office behind the kitchen.

  “I’ll take a look in the attic,” she told Eik as they were about to walk out. Stairs in the laundry room led up to a whitewashed trapdoor in the ceiling. She pushed it open and found a light switch on the floor beside the chimney.

  Several packing boxes and a Christmas tree holder were stacked up close to the door. She stepped inside, the attic floor sagging a bit from her weight. Dust swirled; dark shadows lined the walls. Things, stored and forgotten. There was no sound, no sign of life. Louise shone her flashlight in the corners. Nothing.

  Eik had started the car outside; she heard the diesel purring. She shut off the light, lowered the trapdoor onto her head, and crawled down the steps.

  She glanced around the living room one last time before walking out and getting into the backseat. She sensed Thomsen looking at her in the side mirror. Their eyes met for a moment, then she jerked her head away, leaving him to stare at her profile.

  36

  They drove over the hill outside Særløse. Louise gazed at John Knudsen’s dilapidated farm. Two unmarked police cars were parked on the road, and several people were milling around the farm.

  He could be there, she thought. They could have hidden Sune in the big barn where Pussy had drowned the newborn kittens.

  No one spoke in the car, but she saw from Big Thomsen’s expression in the side mirror that he was thinking. He must have realized by now that he wasn’t the only one the police were interested in. Apparently that relieved him; he slumped down in his seat up front and stared straight ahead.

  She called Nymand and reported in a few short words that they had finished their search. Negative, she said. They were headed for the address where Thomsen claimed he’d spent the night.

  “Have the others reported in?” she asked. He told her that the team searching the mason’s house in Såby had finished. No sign of the boy there, either.

  “At first he claimed he knew nothing about Sune Frandsen. He’d never heard of a nithing pole and had no idea where Ingersminde was,” Nymand said.

  Liar, Louise thought. The mason had worked a long time at Camilla’s manor. She’d hired his company to do the renovation.

  The team searching Pussy’s farm hadn’t reported back yet.

  Louise looked away as they drove past the gamekeeper’s house and into the forest. She hadn’t been there since the night she was attacked, but she knew that the house had been empty since Bodil Parkov had moved out.

  She smiled to herself at how Eik confidently took the road past Avnsø to get to Bitten’s house. The first time they were in the forest together, she’d had the impression that he’d never been that far away from Sydhavnen. And now, he was driving around as if he’d lived there his entire life.

  * * *

  Bitten’s forest ranger house came into sight, and Louise noticed someone outside. From the boyish form and the short hair, she thought it must be Sune walking around, though she’d only seen his picture. Then she realized the figure in tight jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt was Bitten.

  “What the hell!” Thomsen straightened up in his seat as they neared the house. All his things lay piled up in the middle of the courtyard. Bitten had gone back inside, and now an armful of clothes came flying out the door.

  Thomsen shoved the car door open. “What in hell are you doing, you crazy bitch?”

  Bitten whirled around; she hadn’t heard them drive in. She stood with her hands on her hips, her expression telling the world that she wasn’t backing down.

  Louise and Eik were on Thomsen’s heels as he strode across the courtyard; several of the tall, broken hollyhocks outside the door drooped close to the cobblestones. Bitten meant business, it seemed.

  “You can take your fucking
shit and go to hell,” Bitten snapped when Thomsen started shouting at her again.

  René’s frail wife had also managed to drag his big chair out to the courtyard. It lay on its side, the large flat-screen TV on top of it. Thomsen’s face turned red when he saw it. He stepped up to Bitten, and before Louise and Eik could stop him he punched her in the face.

  “You’re going to regret this,” he said, hunched over now as Eik twisted his arm from behind and pulled him back.

  Bitten didn’t answer. She held her hand to her cheek as blood began to flow from her nose onto the back of her hand. But she looked defiantly at Thomsen.

  “You are the biggest asshole to ever walk on two legs,” she said. “I never want to see you again.”

  “What happened?” Louise asked as Eik steered Big Thomsen back to the car, threatening him with charges of battery.

  “René refused to see me when I visited him today.” Bitten’s voice was nearly unrecognizable from bitterness. “Asshole there apparently delivered a message to him, told him I wanted a divorce, that I’d hired a lawyer, the papers were already written up. I’ve never said I wanted a divorce, and then when I tried to use my debit card, it was blocked. I went to the bank, and they told me that René’s salary, which usually goes into our joint account, hadn’t come in. And I thought I was helping René by being friendly to Thomsen while he was in jail.”

  Bitten wiped her hand on her jeans, a smear of blood appearing on her thigh. Her nose was still bleeding, and Louise suggested they go inside so she could put ice on it.

  “All the while he’s been saying he’d help me and my daughter—that everything would be all right. He’d keep René on the payroll so we wouldn’t suffer.” In the kitchen, Louise wrapped a washcloth around ice and held it to Bitten’s nose. She continued to explain how she’d been used, how she felt like she’d walked into a trap.

  “He’s here all the time. The deal was that he would come only when my daughter was asleep or not home, and now he insists on taking her to school in the morning and being part of the family. He’s taken over everything. Today he was sleeping in bed when I came home from the jail. Do you know what he said when I asked why he was destroying my family?”

  Bitten’s face was contorted with rage. “He said he would crush René, just because he could! Like he was talking about swatting a fly!”

  She threw the washcloth down and dried her cheek on her sleeve. “He said that nobody got away with stabbing him in the back.”

  “Stabbing him in the back?” Louise said.

  “He’d heard that René told you about the rituals out in the forest, and the woman, too, the boy’s gift.”

  Louise was stunned. “Just how did he know about that?”

  Bitten looked away. Finally she answered, “He shoots skeet with an officer who helped question René.”

  Enraged, Louise grabbed her phone to call Nymand. Bitten rested her forehead on her hand and shook her head, as if she had no idea what to do. “So while I’m being told all this, the bastard is in my bed, snoring!”

  Louise stuck her phone back in her pocket and put her arm around René’s wife. “Did he spend the night with you?”

  Bitten nodded. “He came around eight, emptied the refrigerator, and plopped down in front of the TV. He didn’t even say good night when he came to bed, and he was still asleep when I left to visit René.”

  “And you’re sure he was here all night.”

  Bitten frowned at her. “When a man snores like he does, you know he’s in the house.”

  Louise’s phone rang. Camilla’s name popped up on the display. She excused herself and answered. “Hi.”

  “I found Sune,” her friend whispered.

  37

  Camilla had been sitting in their yard, under a parasol, when Elinor suddenly appeared on the terrace and held out her hand. She’d smiled and said hello; she was getting used to the old woman showing up out of nowhere. But Elinor walked off, still beckoning at Camilla, who then got the message.

  They went down the forest path silently. The old woman’s cane crackled each time she planted it on the ground, but she kept a pace that Camilla, her leg still hurting, struggled to match.

  She was apprehensive when they neared the sacrificial oak in the silent, mysterious forest. Elinor stopped and pointed, and her expression made Camilla even more anxious. She gathered her nerve and looked, then she covered her mouth in shock when she recognized the dark blue jacket and the lifeless body leaning up against the tree.

  Sune’s head hung on his chest, his hair covering his eyes. What froze Camilla, however, was the sight of his right forearm covered in dark blood. She dreaded doing it, but she had to kneel down and press her finger against his throat, check for a pulse. She closed her eyes and concentrated.

  When she stood up, she was shaking so badly that she could barely pull her phone out of her pocket. She crouched down and punched in the emergency number. Time seemed to stand still; she feared she’d gotten there too late. She surprised herself by describing precisely the location in the forest, and after she asked that the information be given to Deputy Commissioner Nymand, the dispatcher told her the ambulance was on its way.

  “I think he’s breathing. It’s hard for me to tell,” Camilla said hesitantly, unsure whether the dispatcher was listening. Then she called Louise, but later she could hardly remember what she’d said; all her attention was on the boy, checking for signs of life. Fingers moving, chest rising. But he simply wasn’t moving.

  Slowly, she realized what had happened. The blood came from his right elbow, and his vein had been cut. There was no doubt about the symbolism—Sune had been placed under the tree as a sacrifice to the gods.

  Desperately, she watched Elinor walk around in small circles over by the bonfire site. Her lips were moving, but no sound came out.

  From her stint on the crime desk of a newspaper, Camilla knew that a person with a main artery cut had very little time. She pulled herself together and ripped off her blouse, tearing it into rags.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she mumbled. She began speaking to him in a calm voice, as much for her sake as his. She lay him on the ground and lifted his legs, rested them on the tree trunk so the blood would run down to his head, and bound strips of cloth around Sune’s upper arm. The ambulance wailed in the distance. Her mind was racing; heart massage, artificial respiration—would she be doing more harm than good? She grabbed a small stick, stuck it in between the windings of cloth, and twisted the stick to tighten the tourniquet.

  38

  They left Bitten’s house immediately after Camilla’s call. When Thomsen had demanded to know what was going on, they told him to shut up.

  Eik dumped Big Thomsen off at the roundabout near Særløse. Louise ignored his bitching about not being driven all the way home. She knew they were going to hear about it.

  Thomsen pounded his fist on the hood. “You’ll find your way home,” Eik said from his open window. Before the big man could answer, Eik put the car in gear and floored it, gravel rocketing off the car’s undercarriage. Louise watched in the side mirror as Thomsen stood yelling. Nymand called.

  “The father is on his way in. The boy is in emergency, he’s in critical condition.”

  * * *

  The first thing she noticed when they walked into the hospital was the butcher, hunched over in a chair, crying. Louise stopped. Eik put his hand on her back. “I’ll find Nymand. Go on over to him.” He approached a receptionist in a white coat who had just come out of her glassed-in office.

  Louise studied the butcher for a moment. When they’d left him earlier in the day at his home, he’d looked like a man about to fall apart. Now it had happened.

  “Hi,” she said quietly. She sat down beside him. “Have you heard anything?”

  He shook his head and breathed in deeply. They sat for a while in the turmoil of the emergency room. A child screamed in the waiting room, and a nurse rushed off.

  “Come inside,” a
low voice said. Louise looked up into the face of a black woman. “You shouldn’t have to sit out here. You can use the lounge; no one will have time for a break the next few hours anyway.”

  Her badge identified her as a head physician. Louise felt a pang of shame over being surprised that she spoke fluent Danish.

  “When can I see him?” the butcher asked, unaware of anything except that this person could tell him something about his son.

  “We’ll join him in a moment,” the doctor said. She put a hand on his shoulder and led him to a chair at the long table. “But there’s something I have to tell you first.”

  The butcher froze.

  “I’ve come down from the oncology ward. Your wife was admitted early this morning, and it was decided at our morning conference that she should receive terminal care.”

  The butcher, obviously confused, looked first at her, then at Louise. “What does that mean?”

  “That means that we’ve stopped her treatment. But we need your permission to remove nutrition support and stop providing her with fluids. We’ll continue with medication for pain.”

  Again he looked at Louise, who felt tears welling up. She held his hand. “It means that Jane is about to die, Lars.” She pressed her lips together and blinked until her eyes cleared. “You’re her nearest relative; they need your permission. If they keep giving her fluids and nutrition, her death will only be delayed, and it could be a long process.” She looked over at the doctor, who was sitting at his other side.

  “Unfortunately, there’s no more we can do for your wife,” she explained. “She’s entered the final phase, and right now she’s semiconscious. She sleeps most of the time. We’re making sure she’s in no pain. We can’t say exactly how long it will be. It might happen today, or it might take several days, maybe a week. Of course this is more difficult, now that your son has been admitted.”

  The butcher had begun shaking his head, mechanically, from side to side. Louise could see he was unaware of what he was doing. She caught herself pressing her hands against her stomach.