by Lotte Hammer
‘You need to hit her across her thighs, on her buttocks . . . I mean, her arse, and then her back or her shoulders. Watch you don’t damage the kidneys, her neck or genitals.’
Like a good teacher, Jan Podowski indicated the areas without touching the girl. Henrik Krag nodded.
‘How many times do I hit her?’
‘Until I tell you to stop.’
‘And how hard?’
‘As hard as you can.’
No more questions were needed, and there was no more reason to delay. Henrik Krag weighed the truncheon in his hand again, and then slammed it forcefully but with control against the girl’s back. The girl howled, writhing in agony, and swayed back and forth on her rope. Like a piñata, he thought, and gritted his teeth in order not to cry.
‘You can do better than that . . . put your back into it, mate.’
He hit her again in the same place, as hard as he could. The girl wailed pitifully; Benedikte Lerche-Larsen looked away, Jan Podowski nodded wearily. Henrik Krag felt a strange rage well up inside him towards the girl. Perhaps it was her screaming, perhaps because he had had to drag her in here from the car by her ear, and she had refused to take off her clothes so he’d had to pull them off her, or perhaps it was just because she was dangling helplessly in front of him and it was his job to hit her. After that the blows fell more easily, five times, ten times, twenty times; he didn’t count, he just carried on hitting to get it over with. The screams merged into one, interrupted only by the occasional gasp for air, and then suddenly, just as everything was going according to plan, Henrik Krag’s next blow caught the rope and the loose knot around the wood-burning stove undid itself, sending the girl headlong into the floor. Her neck snapped with a small, ugly sound. Silence fell.
CHAPTER 2
The lake squeezed itself in between two uneven slopes, as if there was only just enough room for it. At the dawn of time, melting ice had carved a valley into the landscape, where deciduous trees now made up a small haven in an otherwise sinister and undisturbed coniferous forest. Along the water’s edge, for a full three hundred and sixty degrees, broad borders of reeds, bulrushes and oat grass kept guard, flanked by cotton grass, whose white tufts – also known as the poor man’s cotton and the plaything of the May wind – foretold summer.
The lake had no official name; it was too insignificant to merit that and too inaccessible. Locals simply called it ‘the pond’, and strangers, mostly ornithologists or hunters, had little interest in such insignificant matters. Yet the eastern shore was an exception – old maps referred to this area as Satan’s Bog. Myth had it that a platoon of Swedish troops had camped on this very spot in 1658 on their way to Copenhagen during one of Denmark’s countless wars with its neighbour. In the evening the strangers had amused themselves with the local farmers’ daughters, both willing and unwilling. An orgy that ended with the vicar of Kolleløse Church, no less, being drowned in the lake, when he bravely – armed only with the word of God and his own anger – tried to stop the outrage. The story might play fast and loose with the facts, but the locals hung onto their legends, and it was true that old people around here still believed that if you wanted to cut reeds in Satan’s Bog, you had better make the sign of the cross three times, or you risked bad things happening to you before the year was out.
Jan Podowski didn’t make the sign of the cross. Partly because he didn’t know the legend, and partly because bad things had already happened to him.
He stood by the shore of the lake looking into the undulating reeds, which were as high as a man. Benedikte Lerche-Larsen waited behind him in silence; between them lay a large, coarsely carved granite slab, which had been tethered to a couple of solid, transverse spruce branches with the same rope they had used when punishing the girl. Jan Podowski turned around.
‘You did really well, Benedikte.’
He pointed his foot at the granite between them, a milestone with peeling white paint on the section that stood above ground. Despite its weight, she and Henrik Krag had dragged it almost two kilometres, and although she’d lifted considerably less than her partner, her achievement was still impressive. His praise, however, had no effect on her; she acted as if she hadn’t heard him. A little later she spoke.
‘What will you say to my father?’
‘That there was an accident he doesn’t want to know about and he has lost an investment, of course.’
‘Nothing more than that?’
‘That’s plenty. Both your parents factor in such setbacks. They’ve made allowances for it in their budgets.’
‘What about me?’
‘What about you?’
‘Are you going to tell them I was there?’
The older man waited for a bittern, well hidden by the vegetation, to finish its hollow booming.
‘I thought you were here today on your mother’s orders. To make sure we didn’t go easy on the bitch.’
‘Stop it, Jan! You know that’s a lie.’
He knew perfectly well that her mother hadn’t sent her, but he also knew that prying into her ambitions to learn about every aspect of her parents’ business wasn’t a good idea. Instead he said:
‘I presume you’re only too aware that your parents can’t help you out of this mess. You would get ten years in jail, just like Henrik and me.’
She nodded irritably.
‘I am, how did you put it . . . only too aware that all three of us are in deep shit.’
Henrik Krag had managed to lug his burden down the slope to the lake without slipping or falling once. With the dead, naked girl slung over his shoulders, he zigzagged from one tree to the next until he finally found himself level with the other two. He went over to them and kneeled down beside the stone before carefully unloading the dead weight. Jan Podowski asked:
‘No one saw you?’
The question was superfluous. If he had met anyone, he would hardly have arrived as calmly as he had, but Jan Podowski knew he had run a big risk by letting Henrik Krag carry the girl in the manner he had. Then again, the alternatives were also risky.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘And the cabin is ready to be torched?’
‘Yes.’
Benedikte Lerche-Larsen had turned her back to the body and the two men. Now she asked: ‘Why do you want to torch it? That’s going to attract attention.’
‘Because we have to. We’ve left dozens of forensic clues in there and they will be found, if someone starts looking for them.’
On Jan Podowski’s instructions the body of the Nigerian girl was tied to the stone and the branches. It was time-consuming and Henrik Krag feared they might be discovered at any moment. Hailed by a forest ranger or, worse, by a couple of random hunters carrying guns. But nothing happened, and their macabre work progressed steadily and calmly. First they freed the stone from the lattice of branches, then Jan ordered them to dig a number of parallel grooves, each about half a metre long and about five centimetres deep. He drew an outline with a stick, and although they had only their fingers with which to remove the black, damp soil, the two young people did as he had told them without asking why; Henrik Krag in order not to look stupid, Benedikte Lerche-Larsen because she had quickly realised that her best chance of putting the current nightmare behind her was to obey the older man without hesitation.
When they had finished digging, they laid the spruce branches across the small trenches they’d created, then rolled the stone and eased it on top of them. Finally they arranged the girl in an obscene position as though she were hugging the stone, with her limp arms and legs hanging down the sides. Jan Podowski and Henrik Krag tied her to it as tightly as they could; Benedikte Lerche-Larsen threading the end of the rope through the grooves they had dug under the stone when necessary. All that remained was to carry the stone and body into the lake, and here all three of them had to help.
Yet again it was Jan Podowski who took the lead.
‘We’re going to have to take off our clothes and shoes
, strip down to our underwear. We can’t drive home soaking wet.’
Neither Henrik Krag nor Benedikte Lerche-Larsen protested, so Jan Podowski continued:
‘Prepare yourselves . . . this is going to hurt. The water can’t be more than five degrees so we can only spend a few minutes in the lake, do you understand?’ They nodded and started undressing. Jan Podowski stopped them: ‘No, wait until we’ve agreed who’ll do what. We don’t want to be discussing that while we’re freezing.’
Soon afterwards the men were in their underpants and Benedikte Lerche-Larsen in her knickers and bra, all still wearing shoes. Henrik Krag was shivering from the cold even before he had tied his shoelaces. A light wind he hadn’t noticed until now nipped aggressively at his body
‘I’m bloody freezing here.’
Jan Podowski came down hard on him instantly:
‘Stop whining, it only makes it worse.’
And Benedikte Lerche-Larsen supported him by snarling:
‘You can be warm in prison, or you can be a bit cold out here. Now pick her up.’
Without further ado she stepped into the reeds and waded out until the water reached halfway up her thighs. The men followed her slowly, weighed down by the weight of the girl and the stone between them. Henrik Krag was gasping from the cold, but said nothing. Benedikte Lerche-Larsen had bent the reeds to one side, and step by step the girl and the stone were carried through the vegetation, which soon closed behind them, hiding the shore. When the water reached the men’s waists, buoyancy made their work easier, but their numb limbs put a limit on how much further they could walk.
‘Another ten steps, then we’ll let her go. Come on, Henrik, you can do it. It’s just ten more steps, then it’ll be over; let’s count them together.’
They counted in unison. When they reached ten, the men let go; at that point the water almost reached their necks.
‘Take care not to snap those sodding reeds on your way back. We’ll walk to the shore just as slowly and carefully as we walked out.’
Henrik Krag heard almost nothing, only the word back got through, but Benedikte Lerche-Larsen overtook him and swept back the plants with one hand, while with the other she dragged him to the shore. You didn’t need to be a doctor to realise that the cold was about to overpower him, and he needed to warm up very soon. Jan Podowski’s fat provided excellent insulation against the drop in temperature and he wasn’t so badly affected. He studied the two young people; he would have to sack Henrik Krag, pay him off, tell him to stay away and, most importantly, forget what had happened. It was a shame, he liked the lad, but there was no other option. Then he looked at Benedikte Lerche-Larsen and smiled. For the first time ever he had seen her take after her parents, determined, strong and cynical – sparing neither herself nor anyone else. It was a very different side to what he saw of her most days.
CHAPTER 3
When Henrik Krag and Jan Podowski let go of the stone, the girl sank towards the bottom of the lake, the stone tilting so that she landed on her side, about a metre from where the forest of reeds bordered the open water. Here she lay with her eyes wide open and her mouth gaping, screaming a silent scream into her new world. Her unwitnessed decay began slowly as the low water temperature suppressed biological activity at the bottom of the lake, then progressed faster. At the beginning of April, the effective rasping tongues of the freshwater snails had removed her eyes, and arthropods with long, Latin names had sensed the way to her orifices; when the beech bloomed in May and the aquatic plants swayed above her, luminous green, the process of decay accelerated.
Bacterial gases inflated her from within, and she strained at the ropes in order to rise towards the surface, while small pearl strings of bubbles erupted from her, here, there and everywhere. Towards the early summer the smell of the girl’s body attracted many of the lake’s vultures: crayfish, larvae and fish of many species and sizes. A group of European eels spent Midsummer and the time that followed inside her, but by the week when the lime trees were in blossom and the short Danish summer began to wane, it was over, she had been reduced to a skeleton, and the fish went away one by one. In August the last sinews and muscles gave way, and her right hand floated off, followed soon afterwards by her left. The duck season opened on the first of September.
The hunter had been in his place on the shore of the lake from dawn. He sat patiently on his folding chair as a faint light seeped into the pearl-grey sky from the east and the landscape around him gained colour. His hunting dog, a three-year-old Irish Setter, which so far in its short lifespan had caused him much irritation and very little joy, was lying next to his chair. The dog’s name was Dumbo and he was, quite simply, stupid. The man missed his old dog, which had tragically caught heart and lung worm and, after a dreadful period of illness, had had to leave in his prime. The hunter on his chair reminisced about his old dog as dawn broke, but scratched Dumbo behind the ear nevertheless. The setter couldn’t help his lack of intelligence.
The mallard was hit perfectly in mid-flight and fell to earth like a rock; it crashed through the dry reeds and broke the surface of the water with a splash as the shot echoed from the slope. The hunter briefly punched his fist at the heavenly powers above to celebrate his prize shot; Dumbo stuck his tail between his legs and howled. All that remained was to fetch the quarry. Dumbo was ordered into the lake three times, and three times he returned, wagging his tail but with nothing in his jaws, while his owner shook his head and gradually began to accept that if he wanted that bird in the oven, he would have to fetch it himself. Or shoot another duck over dry land. He peered down at his dog and spoke gruffly.
‘You should count yourself lucky we don’t eat dogs in this country.’
Dumbo perked up and looked happy.
‘Come on, I’ll give you one more chance . . . now go and get that sodding duck.’
Dumbo disappeared into the vegetation for the fourth time. This time the hunter had to call several times before the dog finally returned, proud as a peacock with his find, though it wasn’t the expected mallard.
In his professional life as a press photographer, the hunter had seen many dead bodies, and the skull didn’t shock him badly. It was stained and discoloured in shades of black and brown with strands of algae-coloured hair sticking to the scalp and unnaturally white teeth in the upper jaw, while the lower one was completely missing. For a time he held it in front of him like an actor playing Hamlet, until he was convinced that it was the real thing. Then he set it down carefully in the grass, but thought it best not to give Dumbo the opportunity to run off with his discovery. The man picked up the skull and hung it out of the dog’s reach on a young birch, with one branch sticking through an eye socket – a disrespectful act that later would cost him over two hours of interviews at Hillerød police station where staff had very little sympathy for Dumbo’s lack of manners.
In the days that followed, rain and strong winds drifted in waves across the country from the west, complicating the work of the diving team. The lake might be small, but at its centre it was twelve metres deep, and the shallow water near the shores was tricky to examine because of the vegetation. The returns on the first day were limited to a dead mallard, which partly confirmed the hunter’s story, though no one had ever seriously doubted him, his unseemly treatment of the skull notwithstanding. The second day was quite simply a waste of time; however, the findings on the third day justified the investment. In the morning they found the remains of a hand, and shortly afterwards the lower jaw was discovered hidden among a cluster of water lilies. The findings imbued the two divers with renewed energy, now they were sure there was something to look for, and early that afternoon, the skeleton in Satan’s Bog was found. The girl and the stone were salvaged on a day almost as cold as the one when her killers had carried her into the lake six months earlier.
Hillerød police took charge of the investigation, but despite a technically excellent piece of police work, it produced no result. The post-mortem report concluded th
at the body was that of a woman aged between fifteen and twenty, of medium build and approximately 1.68 metres tall. Her death was caused by a fracture of the second cervical vertebra, and she had no other fractures or deformed bones apart from one which was broken, something that might have happened when she was tied to the granite block.
The investigation’s biggest problem was that the time the body had lain in the water could only be estimated by a very broad margin. The pathologist put four to seven months as the extreme limits, and this was based on a long list of presumptions that made the dating even more unreliable. In practice, it meant that someone had probably lowered the woman into the lake between February and April of that year. However, the post-mortem did reveal one surprising fact: the woman was of African heritage, which was confirmed triply by the remains of her hair, her skull and her DNA. However, the forensic examination produced little else. The rope used to tie the woman to the granite block was thoroughly analysed, but all that could be ascertained was that it was of a type available in most DIY stores across the country. The granite slab was also scrutinised, but at that point the investigation had already established that the stone had formerly stood on the corner where the gravel road that led into Hanehoved Forest joined the main road. It had been ripped from the ground without anyone being able to say when. The technicians made only one positive contribution: a reconstruction of how the woman would have looked when she was alive. The technique for such recreations had improved dramatically in recent years: the process was now both faster and cheaper, and the results had become more reliable.
The investigators focused on two leads, which unfortunately both culminated in a dead end. One lead was Kolleløse Manor, which owned Hanehoved Forest and thus the lake where the woman had been found. The estate belonged to Adam Blixen-Agerskjold, a forward-thinking and approachable man in his early forties, who could trace his family back for centuries. He was also a chamberlain and would make occasional appearances at the royal palace. Together with his wife and a small handful of staff, he ran a thoroughly industrialised farm on the estate’s roughly seven hundred hectares with varying crops of mainly spring barley, winter wheat and wild maize. It was by no means a gold mine, and every krone the landowner made was spent on maintaining his historic buildings. Both he and his wife were conscious of the duty owed to their heritage, even if it was a financially draining commitment appreciated by very few people.
