One, Two ... He Is Coming for You (8 page)

“Bingo,” I said.

“What?” Sune looked at me.

“He was a pedophile.”

“How do you know?”

I pointed at a line on the screen.

“He was killed while watching child porn on his flat-screen TV.”

Sune looked impressed.

“So you think the killer chose a different way of killing Henrik Holch
because he was into having sex with children? “

“Yes.”

“Like a punishment?”

“Something like that.”

“So the first one was a bastard treating people poorly, having several
affairs and just being a real prick all of his life, while the second one was a
disgusting pedophile. Both of them had been involved in the rape of Irene
Hansen.”

“Exactly.”

”So someone is actually doing the world a favor?”

“You can put it like that, yes.”

I paused before continuing. “The question is, which asshole will be
next?”

13

In my mind, Irene Hansen could definitely be a suspect. She had the best
motive for killing these guys, eliminating them one by one as revenge. But
somehow I couldn’t really see that skinny quiet woman being able to take down
these men all by herself. Maybe she wasn’t alone? She had a husband. Maybe he
could have helped her. It was certainly a possibility.

My plan now was to find the rest of the men in the picture. To my
surprise, headquarters loved my story about Didrik Rosenfeldt and wanted to run
it in the morning paper. I expected to hear from Junior immediately after that.
I cleared it with my editor and told him about the unpleasant visit the other
day, but he said that I shouldn’t be thinking about that. The Rosenfeldts did
own the company that owned the newspaper, but they weren’t supposed to be
meddling in the editorial decisions. They had to go through him first, he said.

So I promised him another story about the six boarding school boys who raped
Irene Hansen, a follow-up story to the first article. A “where are they now?”
kind of article. I liked the idea. They raped a local girl, got away with it,
and now they were living the sweet life of rich men.

“Make a small profile of each of them. The public will be interested in
knowing who we have running around in our country, who they really are,
especially since they all are very influential,” my editor said.

So I was free to go after the boarding school boys.

I couldn’t ask them about the rape. I had promised Irene not to blow her
cover. She was hiding from them and told her story anonymously. But I could ask
them about the two guys who were already dead.

It didn’t take Sune long to find the first one, Ulrik Gyldenlove. He
lived in Klampenborg in northern Zeeland, north of Copenhagen the richest part
of the country. I called him and told him I was doing a story about two of his
old friends from school. I wanted to talk to him about them, and much to my
surprise, he agreed to meet with me.

We were to meet at Mattssons Riding Club next to Dyrehaven. It took
about an hour and a half to get there. Dyrehaven was a famous area in
Klampenborg. It was a big forest and had the richest animal wildlife in
Denmark. It was famous for its many kinds of deer and especially for a big hunt
that takes place every first Sunday in November. Hubertusjagten, as it was
called, was an old traditional hunt that was more than a hundred years old. It
was inspired by the old traditional English hunts in England, with the riders
wearing red jackets using of fox hounds. Nowadays they didn’t use the hounds
any more or chase a real fox. Instead they had equipped two riders with a fox
tail on the shoulder and then the rest of the riders were supposed to catch the
tail.

The event was always broadcast on TV and people would flock to the park to
see the hunt every year. Some of the riders always ended up in an especially
muddy pond. People would gather around the pond in order to see who it would be
this year who would end their hunt in a pile of mud, ruining the nice red
jacket.

Ulrik Gyldenlove had just finished riding his horse for the day together
with his daughter and they both got off when I approached them and told who I
was. I told Sune to take some pictures of him with his beautiful horse and we
chatted briefly with his twenty-year-old daughter before we went for a walk in
the forest.

A fog was everywhere and it felt cold and damp on the skin. Between the
trees I now and then spotted movement. I couldn’t tell if it was a deer or
another animal, but there was definitely something in there.

Ulrik Gyldenlove had only lost a bit of his hair since the picture was
taken at the port. He had gotten older and wasn’t as slim as back then. But I
recognized the look in his eyes, and his smile when he now and then showed me
one. He seemed burdened, as though life had been hard on him. That surprised
me. I had expected him to be more like Didrik Rosenfeldt, caring more for
himself than others. But this guy was different.

As we walked slowly along a path in the forest looking at the wildlife,
he sighed deeply.

“This is my favorite spot in the whole world,” he said and took in a
deep breath of the moist air. “So quiet and calm.”

I nodded. It was truly beautiful.

He looked at me with a smile.

“So how did you know I used to be friends with Didrik and Henrik? I
haven’t seen any of them in ages. We can hardly call each other friends anymore.”

“Why haven’t you seen each other for so long?” I asked deliberately
avoiding answering his question.

“Oh, I don’t know. It has been so many years. Time flies. We went to the
same school for years and I have tried to watch everybody’s careers from a
distance, but we never saw each other since the day we graduated.”

“Why do you think that is?”

He shook his head. “We were just school buddies. We really didn’t have
that much in common.”

We walked down the path for awhile in silence. Then I took out Irene’s
picture from the pocket in my brown leather jacket. I showed it to him.

He stopped and stared at it for a long time.

”How did you get that picture?” He said.

“It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you seem to be much more
than just school buddies in this picture.”

He sighed deeply and put a hand to his forehead. He seemed a bit preoccupied
for a second.

“What is it you want from me?” he asked.

“I want to know about your friends. What were they like? My sister used
to date Didrik Rosenfeldt for a short while and she told me you and your
friends acted out a lot when you came to Karrebaeksminde on summer vacation in
the Rosenfeldt’s residence. That you harassed people on the port area, and I
know that you were at one point accused of having raped a girl on the boat.”

Ulrik Gyldenlove sighed again.

“I just want to know the truth,” I continued.

“You must do your research a little better next time,” he said handing
me the picture back. “The charges were all dropped. There was no case against
us. They were false accusations. The poor girl must have been mentally ill or
something.”

“It was dropped because you paid her family off. Don’t think I didn’t do
my research,” I said, suddenly afraid of having said too much. Would they come
after Irene for this?

He sighed again. “It’s such a long time ago. Why dig up the past now?
Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

“Because someone is killing your old school buddies and it might be
because of something you did back then. For all I know you might be next.”

He looked at me with serious eyes. “Don’t you think I have been asking
myself that?”

14

Ulrik Gyldenlove was quiet for a long period of time while we were still
walking on the path. I had borrowed a pair of Wellies at the Riding Club and
they made a funny squelching sound when I walked. We reached Erimitageslottet,
a small castle that never was used for the royalties to live in, but as a place
for the king to have his banquet for the riders of the hunt. It was placed on
the highest point of the forest overlooking all of the beautiful landscape.

It had a big history. I sensed that as we passed it.

“Most of the other students were afraid of that group,” he said suddenly
without looking at me. He stared out in the wide landscape that opened up
between the trees. A flock of deer were gathered not far from us. One looked up
and stared back at us.

“They enjoyed it. They liked to make people scared of them,” he
continued. ”The school was their domain. And a lot of the other students got a
taste of their tough love. They had a reputation of being like wild animals.”

“What do you mean by they ‘got a taste of their tough love’?”

“They beat them up. Sometimes half to death.”

“Why?”

He looked at me. “For fun.” He looked away again. ”They got some kind of
pleasure out of it. Sometimes there was no reason at all for them to pick on
some poor kid and beat the crap out of him. He was just at the wrong place at
the wrong time.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“What is there to understand? They were just pure evil. They wanted to
be evil.”

“But weren’t they afraid to be kicked out of the school? Didn’t their
parents send them there to get a good education and a bright future?”

“You don’t know a lot about boarding schools do you?”

“I’m sure I don’t.”

“Boarding schools are used for rich parents to get rid of their kids.
Sending them to boarding school means they don’t have to deal with them any
longer. Most rich parents are emotionally inadequate, almost disabled. Because their
own parents didn’t love them, they are not capable of loving their children.
Then they ship them off to boarding school and only have to spend time with
them on the holidays. And even  then they will be too busy for them. So
they are left to themselves. Rich and merciless. Without any compassion for
other human beings since they haven’t gotten any growing up. That’s the life of
most boarding school kids. They did indeed want to amount to something. But
they knew they would on account of their parents. And everybody knew if you
wanted to be someone when school was over, you’d better not have pissed these
guys off while you were in the school. If you were friends with Didrik
Rosenfeldt you would surely amount to something later in life.”

“But you are not like that. You are different, why?”

“I broke off with them in 1986. Told them I didn’t want to be a part of
their game anymore. It was over for me.”

“Game?”

He sighed again. I sensed that he had been running from this story most
of his adult life, thinking he could escape it, but now it had caught up on
him.

“They had a game called ‘A Gentleman Hunt.’”

“A Gentleman Hunt? What was that?

“It was a game that Didrik Rosenfeldt invented. One of the guys would
come up with a fantasy and they would go out and make it real. Like raping the
girl while dressed as Freddy Krueger. It was a challenge. Someone would
challenge the rest of the group to do something awful and then they had to do
it. If one refused they would be beaten up and thrown out of the game. To be excluded
from the group meant no protection. You were certain to be their next victim.”

“How did he come up with that?”

“One time he told us he had this fantasy about scaring the shit out of a
boy in eighth grade, and then he told the rest of the group what he wanted to
do to him, and then they all went out and did it.”

“What did they do?”

“The kid was from the U.S. He had lost his parents in a car accident and
had this one picture of them he always kept close to him, in his pocket. Didrik
and the rest took the picture from him one afternoon in the boys’ bathroom.
They took it from his clothes while the kid was in the shower. When he came out
all naked they showed him they had taken it. He wanted it back and started
crying, but they didn’t care. They stuck the picture in his mouth and lit it on
fire. He was to hold it like that. If he dropped it they would shoot him, they
said and placed a gun to the boy’s head. As the picture burned the crying boy
eventually burned himself and dropped the burning picture to the floor.”

“Then what?”

“Then they pulled the trigger. But it clicked. It wasn’t loaded.”

“Wow. That was tough.”

“The boy had to leave the school after that.”

“What about Didrik Rosenfeldt and his gang?”

“Their parents paid the victim off and they continued their lives. And
this was just the beginning. Now they started picking on all the new students who
came to the school. Challenging each other in various fantasies and making them
real.”

“Someone must have been complaining about them to the headmaster.”

“Some did every once in a while. And they paid the price for it. I
remember one in particular who told on the boys and they hung him from the
ceiling in the gym, by his arms. Then they beat him all night like a punching
ball. He had to spend six months in the hospital. And he never told anyone who
did it.”

Ulrik looked up and spotted a falcon looking for food on the ground. He
pointed at it and I saw it too. The fog had gotten lighter and we could now see
more of the forest.

“Did they pick on you?” I asked.

“You only pick on someone who won’t fight back.”

I nodded.

“But I could have stopped them,” he then said. “I should have.”

We began to walk back to the riding club. I had promised Sune I wouldn’t
take too long since we had a long drive home, and he had to pick up his son.

“You have a son?” I asked in surprise.

“Yes I do.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”