Fatal Crossing Page 3

  ‘Of course it is. Just search the database. What are you looking for?’

  ‘A story from the mid-1980s.’

  ‘Then it won’t be in our archive, sweet pea. As you know Globalt didn’t see the light of day until 1998.’

  After a pause, which he used to adjust the colour contrast in a desert landscape, he said, ‘But you could always try ServiceMedia. They’ve collated most of the press photos ever issued by Danish media. You can use my password, if you keep quiet about it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, sitting down at the nearest computer.

  First she googled ‘disappearance England ferry’ and quickly found several articles about how Lulu Brandt and Lisbeth Mogensen had vanished without a trace.

  By clicking back and forth she found out more about the story in the national newspapers, Ekstra Bladet and BT, as well as a large feature in a local newspaper, Ringkøbing Amts Dagblad, in which the journalist had stressed that the care home where the girls lived — a place called Vestergården — was only fifteen kilometres from the town of Ringkøbing. She printed out the pages so she could read them later.

  She then made a note of the date of their disappearance — 4 August 1985 — and logged on to ServiceMedia's homepage and searched using Magnus's password, which turned out to be Hendrix78. She didn’t ask, but he explained it himself.

  ‘My dog,’ he said with a grin, pointing to a picture of a drooling boxer hanging above his desk.

  There were eight pictures from the case. Ringkøbing Amts Dagblad had three. The first showed Vestergården, the second a broadly grinning man with a full beard described as Kurt Damtoft, warden of Vestergården, and she had a vague feeling that she had seen the third picture before. The two girls on it were part of a group of smiling teenagers standing in the port of Esbjerg, waiting to go on the trip of a lifetime. Lisbeth appeared to squint against the sun, and next to a gigantic ghetto blaster a dark-haired Lulu was smiling shyly at the camera.

  She clicked on to Ekstra Bladet and BT. Both featured pictures from the court case against Kurt Damtoft and two of his colleagues. ‘Grievous neglect!’ Ekstra Bladet raged. Both newspapers had reprinted the pictures of the two girls at the port with the ferry in the background.

  ‘The last picture of the girls alive,’ read one of the captions accompanying an article, which went as far as concluding that ‘the two beauties from Jutland were murdered at sea’.

  Nora rummaged around her handbag and found her diary where she was keeping the Polaroid of the two girls. She pulled it out and studied it again.

  The picture in Ekstra Bladet clearly wasn’t the final picture taken of the girls while they were still alive. Someone had photographed Lisbeth and Lulu on board the ferry while they were apart from the other teenagers from Vestergården. The question now was who, and why no one had given it to the press when the investigation into the missing girls was at its peak. And what was it doing in a suitcase from Brine.

  In return for a cup of coffee, Magnus agreed to scan her picture into the computer. She emailed it to herself, and got him to print out some paper copies. Then she printed out a couple of the group pictures and stuffed everything into her bag before she left to catch the train to Ørestaden.

  4

  She had met Louise when they both sat the entrance exam to the School of Journalism. Something about the petite girl with the crewcut and the dangling earrings had piqued Nora's interest during the break. When they started talking, it soon became clear that they shared the same dry sense of humour, and that Louise had forgotten to bring food or money for a whole day of tests.

  After a few detours via alternative, underground magazines, Louise had surprised everyone by landing a job with DR, the Danish state broadcasting corporation, where today she was a feared and respected producer on the news desk. Sources notorious for refusing to appear on TV could somehow never say no to Louise. She was a woman who made things happen.

  Nora got off the train, walked up to the main reception and signed in. Three minutes later a beaming Louise came rushing down the stairs with a stack of papers under her arm.

  ‘Hello, gorgeous! Great to see you,’ she said, checking her wrist-watch in the same movement.

  ‘I have twenty-five minutes. I’m waiting for a call from Bertil Brask's people,’ she said, referring to the latest discredited CEO to run a company into the ground.

  ‘He's willing to go on TV?’ Nora was astonished.

  ‘They’re considering it, and that's good enough for me,’ Louise said, sounding optimistic.

  They went to the canteen.

  ‘How is Tobias?’ Nora asked when they had sat down with their lunch.

  Louise pulled a face. ‘He's already planning his confirmation next year. I don’t know how that happened. One moment I had a sweet, cuddly boy with dimples, now there's a surly teenager with white iPod earplugs permanently attached to him, moping around the house. That is, when he bothers to come home at all.’

  At seventeen Louise had got pregnant by a bass player in a British band. She never saw the bass player again, but nine months after the group's triumphant farewell concert in Denmark, Tobias arrived. Somehow Louise had managed her studies and a baby while living on a grant, without any help from her disapproving parents.

  They talked about men. About their bosses and about how a seemingly endless series of cuts had led to redundancies among several of their former colleagues, in print media as well as radio and television. When Louise finished her water and made to get up, Nora remembered the Polaroid in her bag.

  ‘I wonder if you could help me. I want to view a programme that was broadcast last year. An episode of Unsolved.’

  Louise got up, took her tray and carried it to the stand.

  ‘No problem. The archive owes me a favour. I’ll call them now.’ She pulled out her mobile and made an appointment for her.

  ‘Just ask for Susanne,’ she said to Nora.

  Her phone rang in the middle of their farewell hug.

  ‘Yes. Speaking,’ Louise said in her business voice. She waved to Nora and mouthed ‘Bertil Brask’.

  Nora followed the signs and eventually found the archive, which was run by a smiling, slightly chubby, grey-haired woman in a canary yellow shirt, who was sitting behind a counter.

  ‘Are you Susanne?’

  The woman nodded. ‘And you were sent by my friend Louise? How can I help you?’

  Nora explained what she was looking for, and Susanne entered the information into her computer.

  The answer appeared less than ten seconds after she hit ‘enter’.

  ‘Here we are. Unsolved. Repeated on the fifth of April last year,’ she said, writing down a long number on a piece of paper.

  ‘Wait here,’ Susanne ordered before getting up from her office chair, walking past Nora and through a door that required her to run the ID card dangling from a string around her neck through a card reader.

  Nora sat down and studied the modern design of the room, which looked as if all evidence of humanity had been systematically erased. Everything was sharp angles and glass partitions.

  She jumped when the door opened and Susanne reappeared holding a large, grey cassette.

  ‘Here you are. You can’t take it with you, but you can watch it in there,’ she said, pointing to a door with a sign that read Meeting Room 2.

  Nora took the tape, entered the room, turned on the video player and sat at the empty conference table.

  Unsolved's red logo rolled across the screen to the sound of the ominous signature tune that had introduced the programme for the last ten years.

  The host, Jens Blindkilde, appeared wearing a trench coat in front of what must surely be Esbjerg Ferry Terminal. As always, his face assumed a grave expression.

  ‘Tonight we investigate a case that has haunted Danish and British police for years. The case of two young women who vanished without a trace on a ferry going from Denmark to England. The case of the girls from the England ferry,’ he said in
a portentous voice.

  Nora rummaged around her bag and found a pen and a notepad with some blank pages. Half an hour later the credits rolled across the screen, and Nora reviewed her notes.

  Lulu and Lisbeth had last been seen about half an hour after the ferry departed from Esbjerg. A female passenger, whom Blindkilde and his researchers had managed to track down, believed she had seen them in the company of a man, but couldn’t after all these years remember whether he was dark or blond, tall or short. Despite the presenter using the term ‘sensational’ three times during the programme to describe the witness, Nora was unconvinced. It looked like a dead end. They had tracked down Lulu's biological father, but he had declined to take part. He hadn’t seen his daughter since she was taken into care at the age of ten.

  In a written statement he had said that ‘not a day goes by when I don’t think about what could have happened to my sweet little Lulu’.

  There was a short extract of an interview with a man called Karl Stark, who after serving as a police officer in Esbjerg, went on to become a detective inspector in Copenhagen. A few short minutes which showed a tortured, grey-haired man who didn’t seem to have much to add.

  In one shot he looked straight at the camera. ‘Those girls deserve justice. Somebody out there must know what happened to them,’ he appealed.

  Nora pressed to eject the tape, popped it back in the cassette case, went out to Susanne and returned it to her with thanks.

  She walked outside into the sunshine, took her mobile from her pocket, searched www.krak.dk for a telephone number and called Andreas's uncle, Svend Jansson, who lived in nearby Dragør. He remembered her well and would be happy to ask Karl Stark if he had time to discuss the case with her. Two minutes after she had rung off, she received a text message with an address in Dragør and an invitation to morning coffee the following day.

  X

  There was a loaf of freshly baked rye bread in the kitchen when she got up the next morning. She carved off a chunk, added some cheese and went out on the terrace to catch the early light.

  Her father was absorbed by a column in Weekendavisen, but grunted amicably under the parasol when he noticed her.

  ‘Please may I borrow the car today?’ she said with her mouth full of rye bread.

  ‘Yes. As long as you’re back in time for us to drive to Kalundborg,’ he replied and continued without further introduction: ‘How is your mother?’

  ‘Fine, I think. Last time I spoke to her she was on her way to a mosaic course in Tuscany. Patrick is still nagging her to move to Devon. But she's staying in London,’ Nora said.

  ‘Is that right? Then again, what on earth would she do with herself down there?’ Her father wondered out loud.

  ‘There's no risk of that happening. She needs to live within walking distance of the British Library, the British Museum and her beloved papers. Otherwise she’ll start climbing the walls,’ Nora said. ‘The question is, can Patrick stick it long term.’

  ‘Well, she just happens to be the country's foremost Cromwell expert. In my opinion, he's the one who has to up sticks and move. Devon!’ he snorted.

  Nora went to shower and left him to his newspaper. The truth was she loathed talking about Patrick and the past because it ripped open old wounds that were better left to heal. She hated reliving the day she had come back early from her morning swim with Andreas and found her mother on the drive with a small, purple, wheeled suitcase, waiting for a taxi.

  ‘Mum, where are you going? Have you been crying?’

  Without answering her question, her mother had said: ‘Nora — why are you back so soon?’

  Before Nora had time to say anything else, the taxi arrived. And Elizabeth was gone.

  Nora had walked slowly inside the house. To the remains of a man she called dad. A man who had just lost the love of his life and would never understand how it had happened.

  What had happened was an apple grower by the name of Patrick from Devon, and Nora had refused to exchange a single word with him or her mother for the next five years.

  She shook off the thought while she dried her hair.

  Half an hour later she was ready to go to Dragør.

  She drove around the old fishing village for a while before she found the small yellow house on Skippervænget.

  A shirtless Jansson was sitting in the front garden drinking cold water from a thick-bottomed glass. It was clear that he had just finished cutting the lawn. On the table in front of him were a small, turquoise Thermos flask, two coffee cups and a copy of Søndag open on the crossword pages. There was a pair of red women's spectacles on top of the magazine.

  He looked up quizzically when she stopped outside the white picket fence.

  ‘Nora?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Come in,’ he said as he sized her up. ‘Yes, I do remember you. You used to go swimming with Andreas, didn’t you?’

  Nora confirmed it, and Svend Jansson went inside to fetch extra coffee cups for Nora and Karl Stark. When he reappeared, he nodded in the direction of the magazine and the spectacles.

  ‘Annika has just popped next door. Something about a new fish recipe she wants to try this evening,’ he explained. ‘But I don’t suppose that's why you’re here. Karl's coming in a minute. He doesn’t have all that much time. I believe he's off to watch his grandchild play volleyball.’

  ‘I saw him on Unsolved.’

  ‘Yes. He thought that we owed it to the girls to keep looking, I guess. What if there was someone out there who could remember something after all these years? A tiny detail that could give us a break into what really happened,’ he said sadly, and shook his head.

  At that moment the garden gate opened and the grey-haired man Nora had seen on the TV strode towards the garden table.

  His gaze was as firm as his handshake.

  ‘Nora Sand,’ he said, glancing quickly at his wristwatch. ‘I have less than twenty minutes to spare, and I’m doing this as a favour to Svend.’

  Nora appreciated his frankness.

  ‘OK. Then let's get started. I saw you on Unsolved. Did you get any leads from it?’

  Karl Stark shook his head.

  ‘I spent the whole evening manning the phone lines that people were invited to call. We received fourteen calls. All pranksters or false confessions. A man from Greve believed he had seen Lisbeth alive and well at his local fitness centre, where she taught spinning every Wednesday evening. A medium from Herning swore that Lulu's earthly remains were near water. Which, all things being equal, shouldn’t really surprise anyone.’

  ‘What do you think happened?’ Nora asked.

  Karl Stark took his time before replying. Poured coffee, added a spoonful of sugar and stirred.

  ‘I genuinely don’t know. I’ve pondered it for years. It was one of my first cases after coming to Esbjerg. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve reviewed the file, asking myself what more we could have done, what we failed to check. People don’t just vanish into thin air. Could they have jumped overboard in a suicide pact? I don’t believe it,’ he said and then he lowered his voice.

  ‘The press were never told this, but we found a cutting in the backpack Lisbeth left behind. It was from a teen magazine and was about how to become a model in London. Why would she jump overboard, if she had dreams for her future?’

  He raked his fingers through his hair, and shook his head.

  ‘I’m an old fool. When I moved to Copenhagen, I brought a copy of the file with me. The first few years I took it out whenever I had time. I would stare at it, look for non-existent links until I nearly went mad. It's like when the dentist has drilled a tooth. The tongue keeps probing it. But now ... when the TV programme produced no new leads, I think I just gave up. Nor did we have grieving relatives calling us to ask about the investigation. It's so many years ago and there are always new cases to investigate.’

  Nora took out the printouts from Ekstra Bladet and placed them on the table.

  �
�Is it correct that this is the last picture of the girls?’

  Karl Stark looked at her, then down at the article with the picture of the group from Vestergården waiting to embark. He nodded.

  ‘There are no others in the file, nor have any witnesses come to you with any pictures?’

  He shook his head briefly.

  Nora produced her diary from her bag, took out the Polaroid and placed it on top of the headlines.

  ‘I’m hoping you could tell me about this,’ she said.

  Karl Stark snatched the Polaroid and narrowed his eyes to study it more closely. Seconds later he dropped it as if he had been burned.

  ‘Christ Almighty, girl! Where's that picture from? I’ve never seen it before.’

  He tore a page out of Annika's magazine and folded it around the photograph.

  ‘Who has touched it?’

  ‘Eh. Me ... Andreas. No one else, I think. Not since I found it, certainly,’ Nora said.

  Stark took a deep breath. ‘This is the first new evidence we’ve received since shelving the investigation,’ he said. ‘Tell me right now how you got that picture. I want to know everything.’

  Nora helped herself to coffee and told him the story of the small fishing village of Brine and the suitcase filled with Polaroids of young women.

  While she spoke, Svend Jansson went inside and came back with a pair of tweezers and a white envelope into which he eased the picture. Afterwards he handed the envelope to his old colleague.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind if I keep this,’ Karl Stark said, but he wasn’t asking for permission.

  ‘We’ll see if Forensics can come up with anything. I doubt it, but at least it’ll give them something to do,’ he quipped. ‘I’ll chase it up myself. There may be nothing to it. But I have to know,’ he added gravely.

  ‘Hiiii ...’ a bright, female voice called out.

  Annika came walking up the garden path, her arms laden with fresh rhubarb.

  ‘Look what Flemming gave us!’ she exclaimed happily before turning to the guests. ‘Did he offer you coffee?’

  Karl Stark nodded, emptied his cup and shook hands with Nora and Annika before disappearing down the garden path on his way to the volleyball game.