Fatal Crossing Read online

  She couldn’t remember the origins of the fairy tale where a man is told he can have all the riches in the world, but the only condition is he mustn’t think about a tiger. An impossible task, of course. When you put all your effort into not thinking about a tiger, you have already failed.

  That was the way it was with Andreas now. The only thing she didn’t want to think about was him. And the only subject her thoughts kept churning over was him. She tried talking herself to sleep. Listing every state in the US alphabetically, wondering about meeting Bill Hix, phrasing the questions she would ask him in his cell if he ever agreed to see her. But when she wasn’t thinking about Andreas, she was obsessing about PC Perfect.

  It wasn’t until five o’clock in the morning that she had finally nodded off, dreaming restless dreams about big, blond Valkyries chasing after her with police truncheons. It had taken thirty painful seconds under the cold shower to bring her partly back to life.

  She found a liquorice lozenge in her jacket pocket, locked the car and rang the reception bell.

  Shortly afterwards she was ushered into Jette Kvist's office behind the second glass door in a long corridor covered with dark green institutional linoleum.

  A framed poster for Tunø Jazz Festival hung above the desk, and below it sat a petite woman with horn-rimmed glasses and a long, dark plait down her back, munching a cheese sandwich.

  ‘Nora Sand?’ she said, struggling to finish chewing. ‘Please excuse me, but I get up at six in the morning, so I’m always starving at this hour. Tea? I only have green tea. Will that do?’

  Nora asked for a glass of water and was given it quickly and cold from the tap.

  ‘You’re here about the children from Vestergården?’

  Nora nodded.

  ‘I want to help you as much as I can. But we need to agree right now that none of what I say in this office ends up in Globalt.’

  ‘I’ll never quote you without permission,’ Nora promised, hoping that would suffice.

  Jette Kvist carefully wiped her fingers on a piece of kitchen towel, opened a desk drawer and produced a buff-coloured file.

  ‘Five of them came here. Erik, Oluf, Sonny and Bjarke joined the boys’ wing. Jeannette was two weeks away from turning eighteen when it happened, so she was allowed to go to Copenhagen on her own. But we also got Anni. Remember, she was only fourteen years old at the time.’

  Jette Kvist looked up from the file. ‘Now this is where it gets more complicated as to what I can tell you. Client confidentiality.’

  ‘Does anyone here remember what happened when the children arrived? Were they upset? Were they keeping secrets? Did they ever mention Lulu or Lisbeth?’ Nora pressed her.

  Jette Kvist shook her head sadly. ‘It's so many years ago now. Any staff who were here then have either retired or changed jobs. All I have to refer to are notes taken at the time.’

  Again she looked at the file. ‘There are some notes here, but I have to say they’re of a highly personal nature. It's not information I have the right to pass on. But if it's any consolation, there's nothing which has any connection to that case, in my opinion,’ she said.

  At that moment her mobile buzzed on her desk. Jette Kvist reached out for it and checked the display. ‘I have to take this call. It's my child's nursery.’

  She took the phone, got up and went outside and into the corridor. Just before she closed the door, Nora heard the surprise in her voice: ‘A fever? That doesn’t make any sense. He was absolutely fine this morning.’

  As soon as a small click from the door announced that Jette Kvist had gone, Nora leaned forwards in her chair. She had been able to read upside down since she was seven. It was a game she and David had played on long car journeys across Europe with their parents to visit historical sites.

  ‘Bjarke Helgaard. Referral to psychologist. Sexually deviant behaviour.’

  The door opened again, and Nora stretched out in her chair to cover her sudden movement.

  Jette Kvist seemed flustered and grabbed a light-coloured summer jacket from a peg behind the door. ‘I need to go get my son,’ she explained.

  ‘Just one more thing. Do you know what happened to any of the children — where did they end up? I think I’ve worked out what happened to Erik, Jeanette and Bjarke. But do you know anything about Sonny, Oluf or Anni — where would I find them today?’

  ‘Try the canteen.’

  ‘Eh, pardon?’

  There was a hint of a smile at the corner of Jette Kvist's mouth. ‘Yes. Try the canteen. Anni turns up for work in the kitchen every morning around nine. She should be there now.’

  She herded Nora out of her office and carefully locked the door behind her.

  ‘The canteen is that way,’ she said, pointing to the end of the corridor.

  X

  The smell of minced beef wafted towards Nora and reminded her that she had skipped breakfast. A chubby woman in a chef's jacket that had once been white was busy pouring the contents of an oversized tin of tomatoes into a giant saucepan. Nora took her to be in her forties, but she had not taken good care of herself. Tufts of grey hair peeked out under the blue plastic cap, her nails were bitten to the quick, and she had bags under her eyes.

  Nora looked about her. The kitchen was clean and tidy. The decay was restricted to Anni herself. Possibly.

  Are you Anni?’ Nora asked.

  The woman nodded.

  ‘Do you have a minute?’

  ‘I don’t mind talking, but I haven’t got time to sit down. Lunch is in ninety minutes,’ she said, bending down to one of the ovens and pulling out a banana tray cake.

  The sweet, spicy aroma was irresistible. ‘Please may I have a piece,’ Nora said hopefully.

  ‘You can put five kroner into that,’ Anni said, pointing to a piggy-bank shaped like a pink flamingo.

  Nora perched on a stool while Anni cut her a slice of cake, placed it on a white napkin and set it down on the table next to her.

  Then she went to the sink, tipped a few kilos of carrots out of a bag and started peeling them efficiently and methodically next to Nora.

  ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ she said in voice which more than implied that the answer was of little interest to her.

  Nora introduced herself and explained that she was taking a closer look at the Lulu and Lisbeth case. Before she had even finished the first sentence, she could see that the subject made Anni very uncomfortable. Her pale cheeks flushed, and the movements of the peeler grew increasingly irate.

  Finally she turned to Nora. ‘Why can’t you people understand that I just want to be left alone?’ she hissed.

  Nora looked at her quizzically.

  ‘They were here from the telly last year. I didn’t want to talk about it then — and I still don’t. So get it into your thick skulls.’

  ‘I’m not from the telly,’ Nora said in her most reassuring voice. ‘But I would still like to know what you have to say. And, if you prefer, it can stay just between the two of us. I’m only trying to understand what happened back then.’

  By now Anni had red patches on her throat and her bottom lip was quivering. ‘I want you to leave me alone,’ she said firmly.

  ‘OK,’ Nora said, getting up. ‘I’ll respect that, of course. But if you change your mind, I’d really like you to call me,’ she said, rummaging around for that bundle of business cards she thought she had chucked into her handbag. Now they were lost under old newspapers, receipts, hairbands, pens and sesame seeds from a long-eaten bagel. Finally she gave up, found an old envelope from a bank statement, tore off a corner and scribbled down her mobile number.

  Anni appeared to relax at the sight of Nora's chaotic battle with her handbag.

  ‘My shift ends at three. You’ll find me by the bus stop, if you like. But I won’t go on the telly. And I don’t want my name made public,’ she said at length.

  Nora thanked her, scrunched up the napkin, binned it and left Anni to the carrots and the imminent lunch.
r />   She drove to the centre of Viborg, parked outside a supermarket and started looking for a hotdog stall. Whenever she was in Denmark, she always took the opportunity to enjoy a hotdog.

  Overall, the British reputation for cooking the world's worst food was undeserved, in Nora's opinion. At least when in London. There you could get the world's best sushi, curry and Thai. But they had no idea how to do a proper hotdog. In Britain sausages were served as ‘bangers and mash’: Cumberland sausages messed about with sage and served with bland mash and brown gravy straight from a tin.

  Nora shuddered at the thought while the hotdog vendor opened a bottle of Cocio chocolate milk and asked if she wanted her hotdog with ‘everything’.

  Ten minutes later, sated and contented, she had managed to scrape off most of the mustard she had spilt down her T-shirt and avoid getting a parking ticket. She reset her parking disc to the current time, fetched her laptop from the boot and went hunting for a café with Wi-Fi to pass the time until Anni's shift ended.

  Anni was standing by the bus stop, shivering. Even without the filthy chef's jacket and the plastic cap over her hair, she looked lost and pathetic. She glanced around quickly before jumping into the passenger seat next to Nora.

  ‘You can drive me home. But I don’t want you coming inside. I don’t want my boyfriend to know.’

  ‘But what's there to know? Surely it's not your fault you once stayed at a care home where two girls went missing,’ Nora said.

  ‘As far as he knows, my only connection with Mikkelsgården is that I work there. He thinks I’m normal. I told him my parents died in a car crash. Turn right here,’ Anni said and pointed.

  They drove in silence while Nora wondered how to put Anni at ease. Finally she opted for an open question.

  ‘What can you remember from the trip? From the ferry,’ she asked, glancing sideways at Anni in order to detect even the slightest hint of panic. Or lying.

  Anni rubbed her forehead and agonised. ‘It was supposed to have been a great adventure. We all got new passports. I was so excited about going to London. I had seen pictures of Big Ben. Oxford Street. Punk rockers in King's Cross. But it never happened. In fact, I’ve never been to London, and now I probably never will,’ she said, her voice sounding bitter.

  ‘Was there anything unusual about Lisbeth or Lulu that day? Or about any of the others?’ Nora fished.

  ‘Everything was unusual. None of us had ever been abroad before. It was amazing. Right until it happened.’

  ‘The girls going missing, you mean?’

  ‘Take the third exit at the roundabout and then straight through the next two junctions.’

  Anni took her time before answering the question.

  ‘Something happened before Lisbeth and Lulu went missing. Or at least before we discovered they were gone. Something happened to me.’

  Nora kept her eyes on the road and let Anni take her time.

  ‘Turn left here. And then it's number thirty-seven,’ she said eventually, pointing to a glum 1970s apartment building of yellow brick with dark brown teak windows.

  Nora pulled into the car park and stopped. When she turned off the engine, the silence in the car was deafening. They were parked in front of an abandoned playground with a swing and a partly trashed Wendy house covered in badly executed graffiti.

  Anni stayed where she was. But out of the corner of her eye, Nora could see Anni's fingers clenching nervously, unclenching and contracting again in a self-soothing rhythm.

  ‘What happened to you, Anni?’ she asked quietly.

  It was like pushing a button. Anni took a sharp intake of breath, then the tears started to flow. First a single drop on to her clothes, then a quiet stream while her face contorted in anguish.

  ‘I’ve never told anyone.’

  ‘Told anyone what?’

  ‘He raped me. He raped me,’ Anni sobbed.

  Nora reached out and clutched Anni's hand.

  ‘He said I should come with him, and I was stupid, so stupid. I just went with him. I thought he was my friend. But he forced me, and ... I ... bled. But after the girls went missing, no one else mattered.’

  Nora stroked her hand in an attempt to calm her down a little, before asking the inevitable question. ‘Who raped you?’

  ‘Oluf, Oluf, that bastard.’

  ‘Bjarke held me down. He was going to as well, but he couldn’t do it. And then I escaped. I locked myself in the toilet. When I came back, there was so much commotion. Everyone was looking for Lisbeth and Lulu.’

  She forced the words out between dry sobs. ‘It took ages before I found Kurt. I tried to make him listen. I pulled his arm, but he looked at me with those beer goggles. He didn’t want to know. I’ve never forgotten his words. He said: “Don’t waste your breath.” I’ve never forgotten that.’

  ‘But why didn’t you say something? Later?’ Nora asked.

  ‘Who was going to believe a loser like me? Bjarke said they would beat me up if I told anyone. What could I have done? Told a grownup what they’d done and then gone on living in the same house as them, never knowing when they would come for me?’

  She looked at Nora with a dull gaze. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more. Don’t come back.’

  She released her seat belt, opened the door, got out of the car, and before Nora could react, she had disappeared across the playground and down one of the alleyways between the blocks.

  ‘Anni?’ she called out.

  But there was no reply.

  Pensively she took out her mobile, rang the main switchboard of one of the big tabloid newspapers and asked to speak to Torstein Abel.

  Three seconds later she could hear his deep voice in the handset. ‘Crime Section. Abel speaking.’

  ‘Nora Sand,’ Nora said, holding the phone away from her ear.

  His reaction didn’t disappoint. ‘Bloody hell, Nora! You old witch! I thought you had put down roots in London, and forgotten all about us back home in Denmark,’ he said.

  Once, lost in the mists of time, Nora had done work experience at a national newspaper alongside Torstein Abel. The tabloid's foremost crime reporter looked like a tough guy, complete with tattoos, biker leather jacket and motorbike. A week after Nora had first met him, he made her watch his favourite movie, The Godfather, which he knew inside out and would often quote.

  When they reached the scene where a film director finds a bloody present in his bed, Torstein clapped his hands with joy. ‘The day I wake up and find a horse's head in my bed, I’ll know I’ve written the scoop of my life,’ he said.

  That hadn’t happened yet, but a couple of times he had come close and now most tabloid readers knew and loved him. To them he was the perfect, hard-boiled reporter — the kind you only ever read about in those American potboilers you buy at airports. The man who was on the scene of the goriest murders, and had the guts to write about immigrant and biker gangs when other journalists chickened out.

  However, the fortunate few who were admitted into his den on Frederiksberg would find — to their enormous surprise — a home of tatami mats, books on Zen Buddhism and a kitchen characterised by a lifelong passion for pickling. Nora still had Torstein to thank for the best recipe for pickled marrow she had ever tasted.

  They agreed to have lunch in Copenhagen the next day.

  ‘It's not that I don’t believe your sincere motives and your eternal friendship, but is this a special occasion?’ he asked.

  Nora chuckled. ‘As always, your journalistic sixth sense is bang on. I want to learn about biker gangs — and who knows more than you?’ she flattered him shamelessly.

  ‘OK, sweetheart. Tomorrow, one o’clock at the paper. Call me from reception. You’re buying.’

  She ended the call, turned the key in the ignition and drove to Copenhagen. Even before she had reached the outskirts of Viborg, she had found a radio station with classical music so her mind could run free while Albinoni's ‘Adagio’ filled the small car.

  Was it purely a c
oincidence that Anni was raped the same evening Lulu and Lisbeth disappeared? Had the girls seen something they shouldn’t have?

  But then how had the Polaroid of the girls found its way into a suitcase in England? Was it yet another coincidence or possibly evidence that a very special kind of predator had been hunting that night on the ferry? A predator who would make Bjarke and Oluf look like a pair of childish amateurs.

  And where did Kurt fit into the picture? Was his drunken talk about the girls being alive more than just that? If he really had received a postcard from them, surely he would have kept it. After all, the case had ruined his career and pretty much his life.

  There were too many loose ends.

  She crossed the Great Belt Bridge long after dinnertime, grabbed a microwaved panini at a motorway service station, and carried on to Copenhagen Airport, where she returned the rental car and treated herself to a taxi to Bagsvӕrd on expenses. She was too exhausted to even contemplate public transport with a laptop and a suitcase in tow, so that battle with the Crayfish would have to be fought later. And there would definitely be a battle, she thought with a wry smile.

  Her father was attending one of his history conferences, so she fished out the key from the tool shed gutter, let herself in, staggered up to her bedroom and collapsed on to her bed.

  Three minutes later she was asleep and was woken only once around five o’clock by a distant car alarm that appeared unstoppable.

  12

  The next morning she rolled drowsily out of bed. She made herself a cup of coffee, went out on the terrace and rang Liselotte to ask if she could remember more about the other participants from the London trip.

  This time her call was answered immediately. ‘It's Make.’

  Nora ransacked her mind. Oh, yes. Liselotte's son.

  ‘Hi. It's Nora. Can I talk to your mum, please?’

  He hesitated. ‘She's not feeling too good right now. I don’t think...’

  Then Nora heard Liselotte's voice in the background. ‘Who is it?’

  There was clattering as if Make covered the phone with his hand, then a distant mumbling.