The Forgotten Girls (20 page)

He reached for the cigarettes, which sat on the nightstand along with his keys and the spare change from his pocket.

The smoke rose in a spiral, drifting toward the open window.

Louise closed her eyes. She felt for him; she understood his anguish only too well. He, too, was torn up inside with sorrow. She hated that he suffered, but she now felt closer to him, and somehow less lonely. She reached out and touched his face, and was about to get up when he put out his cigarette in a glass of water and pulled her down on top of him.

G
OODNESS
!” H
ANNE EXCLAIMED
when they arrived at the department. “You’re radiating red.”

Rønholt’s secretary was watering the plants in the hallway windows.

“Red is the aura of eroticism.”

Hanne cocked her head and contemplated them as if they were enveloped in one big speech bubble that was telling her everything about the night they had spent together.

“Passion and eroticism.”

Jonas had stayed in Roskilde, and Eik had dropped off Louise in Frederiksberg before driving to Sydhavnen himself. He had returned an hour later, his hair wet and clothes clean, to chivalrously pick her up and drive her to the department.

Louise didn’t know what it was that Hanne had spotted—maybe it was all the kissing that had made her chin flush. She
looked down while Eik merely laughed as if he didn’t mind getting found out one bit.

“You spend too much time on crystals and all of your spiritual bullshit, Hanne,” he said.

“This has nothing to do with spirituality,” she objected. “It’s about aura and energy. And right now, you’re both emitting red and I know what that means.”

As Louise turned on her computer, she couldn’t help but smile. She would have a hard time keeping certain details out of her head. Like the fact that her new partner did not wear underpants, a habit he had adopted during the years he spent traveling around Asia and India. And that he refused to send text messages.

She wasn’t really mad at herself; she just felt overwhelmed at the thought of them working together so closely all day. Apparently she was never going to learn. It had been the same story with Mik—awkward.

On the other hand, her prospects of sex were minimal if it wasn’t going to be with a colleague, because she never met anyone else.

“D
O YOU WANT
anything from the cafeteria?” Eik asked from the doorway.

Louise shook her head absentmindedly without taking her eyes off the screen as she re-read the first few lines once more.

When he returned and flopped down across from her, she had logged on to CPR, the police access to the Civil Registration System, and finding Bodil Parkov on Bukkeskov Road in Hvalsø had not been difficult in the least. Louise wrote down the names of her late parents and looked through the rest of the personal data one more time.

“Camilla was right,” she pronounced. “Bodil isn’t married.”

Eik pulled his legs off the table and walked over to stand behind her chair. He ran a finger down her back, making her contract her shoulder blades.

“Jørgen is her brother,” she said and looked up at him.

“Then please explain to me why she’s going around telling people that he’s her husband?” he asked, slurping from his cup. “Incest?”

He looked at her.

Louise shrugged, thinking back for a minute. Maybe she was the one who had misunderstood about them being husband and wife, she thought, but then she shook her head. Bodil had always referred to Jørgen as her husband.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” she moaned, looking out the window while thinking it over. “What does she stand to gain from telling people that they’re married?”

She couldn’t think of anything. She said, “I could kind of see it if it were the other way around; if you were trying to fool social services, so you made up a story that the person you’re living with is your brother.”

She looked questioningly at Eik. When he didn’t react, she added: “Some people do that kind of thing to be able to collect higher benefits.” She rested her chin on her hands, her head feeling tired. Too much champagne and not enough sleep. “They’re renting their house but she probably doesn’t get any subsidies,” she went on.

“Well, they’ve obviously wanted to trick someone,” Eik determined. “Why else would you lie about something like that?”

She nodded. “Yes, why?” she repeated dully.

“What do you know about them?” he asked, filling his cup from the white thermos that he had brought in.

“Nothing,” Louise admitted, considering the question. “Aside from the fact that they’ve lived out there for many years. They keep to themselves, and they’re part of the area.”

Louise moaned and tried to ignore a suffocating smell of fried onions. It was as if the cooking odors from the kitchen below seeped through every crack and opening. With small beads of sweat on her forehead, she got up to open a window but quickly shut it again when she realized that the outlet for the range hood was right underneath.

“Hold on a second,” she excused herself. She needed some cold water on her face to keep the nausea from taking over. She was about to close the restroom door when Eik slid up behind her and pushed his way in there as well.

She gasped for breath as he pressed her up against the wall and kissed her. Louise felt the weight of his body as he leaned in against her, and she gave in when he fumbled for the button on her jeans and clumsily pulled them down over her hips while someone pushed down the door handle, pulling on the locked door.

L
OUISE INSISTED THAT
Eik leave the restroom before her. Once he was out, she leaned in over the sink and gave herself a quick wash-down with the industrial soap from the dispenser. She attempted to comb out her long hair with her fingers but had to abandon the idea, gathering it in a loose braid without an elastic band instead. Once she felt fairly certain that all tracks had been covered, she opened the door and stepped right into the arms of Olle, who had been patiently waiting for the restroom to become available.

For a second they just stood there staring at each other while Louise tried feverishly to think of something to say. She could
tell from his expression that he had been standing there when Eik had come out as well, and she had to resist an instinctive urge to run away with her tail between her legs. Instead she raised her head and smiled at him before walking back toward the Rathole as straight as a ramrod.

“Could you get me the brother’s civil registration number?” Eik asked after she sat back down.

He appeared unaffected by the situation. Either he was used to morning quickies at the office or the lusts of the flesh were simply as natural to him as not wearing underpants.

“Then I’ll run him through the Central Crime Register.”

Louise was uncomfortable with handing over Jørgen and Bodil like that just because Bodil happened to have been a part of the twins’ life at one point in the distant past. And she probably ought to call Viggo Andersen, she thought. But what would she say to him? There was no news, after all.

“Jørgen Parkov,” she read aloud and then the number while Eik entered the digits.

Louise watched him as his eyes moved down the lines and lingered on his pronounced cheekbones and angular chin. She felt flushed and cast down her eyes.

“There’s nothing on him,” he said, shaking his head. “Aside from a remark that there’s an old police report on him but it dates so far back that we would have to go to the National Archives to find it.”

“Then I’ll go to the National Archives,” she decided.

“But is it of interest?” he objected, washing down two Tylenols with his black coffee before getting up. On the way to the wastebasket, he stopped to caress the back of her neck. “Wouldn’t we be better off having a talk with the strict Lillian?”

Louise tried to remain calm and focused as she entered Bodil Parkov’s civil registration number into the Central Crime
Register. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for but she needed to do something while the heat from his fingers sent surges of electricity through her.

“You think Parkov knows what happened to the twins,” he guessed, reading along on her screen. It showed zero results on her search.

Louise shrugged. “I don’t know what I think,” she answered honestly.

He let go of her when they heard a knock at the door but not quickly enough for Hanne to miss the intimate touch as she came to inform Louise that she had put her name on her cubbyhole and put the agenda for the next managers’ meeting in there.

“Thanks, Hanne,” Louise said, flustered, and stood up. She suddenly felt like she was suffocating. The office walls were closing in on her.

“Why don’t you set up an appointment with Lillian? I’ll be back in an hour,” she said to Eik as she grabbed her jacket.

She needed to get some air and get away from what they had set in motion. She avoided his gaze as she left the office, embarrassed to be fleeing like that.

S
HE LEANED HER
head against the wall and dozed while waiting for the young archivist at the National Archives to return. She had no idea if he had been gone for two or twenty minutes, and she startled when he put his hand on her shoulder and lightly shook her.

“No luck, I’m afraid,” he apologized. “We don’t have anything on him or Bodil Parkov. Just this old police report, which the neighbor retracted soon after.”

“Can I see it?” Louise asked, straightening herself up.

“It doesn’t say much. It’s from 1958 and no charges were ever filed.”

“Does it have the name of the informer?” she asked, reaching for the file.

Louise pulled a piece of paper from the faded brown folder. As she tried to decipher the old police report, she realized that she needed to seriously consider whether it might be time for her to get some reading glasses.

She got up and walked over to the window, but the archivist was right: The case had been retracted just five days after the neighbor, Rosen, filed the report against the Parkov family. And then it was closed and archived.

Louise dug around her bag for a notepad, cursing when she concluded that she had forgotten to bring one when she left the office in such a rush.

Eik was in every fiber of her body. Her skin burned whenever she thought of him, and she longed for the dark of the night and his warm breath.

“Can I make a copy?” Louise asked when she returned to the counter where the young guy was having an apple and some juice.

He tipped his head toward an open door next to him. “It’s in there,” he said without getting up. Apparently it was self-service while he was “on lunch.”

She was putting the photocopies in her bag when Eik called.

“I’ve tracked down an old medical file for Jørgen Parkov,” he began. “We need a court order to have it turned over to us but I just got an oral summary. You’d better hurry back.”

“S
EXUAL ABNORMALITY
,” E
IK
said, reading from his notes when Louise walked back into the office. “As a result of the injury to
his frontal lobes, Jørgen Parkov is unable to restrain his natural urges.”

He looked at her gravely. Every hint of eroticism and flirtation had gone from his eyes.

“Hunger, desire,” he listed. “The body’s natural need for full strength.”

Louise listened dumbfounded while she pulled out her chair and sat down.

“The file covers a four-year period during which he was placed in a mental home,” he continued.

“How old was he at the time?” she broke in.

He looked at her seriously.

“He was fourteen when he was placed under the Care Division.”

“So what about the work accident? That never happened?” Louise asked in confusion.

“Apparently not,” Eik said. “While he was at the home, he assaulted the other boys. According to the consultant doctor’s summary, the boy’s mother, Gerda Parkov, wouldn’t face how bad things were with her son. Throughout the years that Jørgen was placed in the men’s isolation facility, he was medicated to curb his urges and allow the doctors to control him. As a natural step in the course of treatment, a castration was planned for a later date.”

“And that never happened?” Louise asked.

Eik shook his head. “His treatment was interrupted when his mother objected to her son being forcibly castrated.”

“What about the medication?”

He shrugged.

“When did all of this take place?”

“He was placed at the institution in 1958,” he said. “He was just a teenager then. He was discharged in 1962.”

“But then what happened?” she asked, noting that 1958 was the same year the neighbor had filed the police report.

They sat for a minute, letting it all sink in. Shaken, Louise then turned around to the computer on her desk to see what she could find on Parkov’s old neighbor.

E
DITH
R
OSEN LIVED
in a summer house in a town called Horneby in northern Zealand. According to Louise’s search, she was the only living person who could be traced back to Rungsted, where the family had lived next door to the merchant Parkov ages ago. Louise learned from the national register database that they had moved from the address in 1962—the same year that Jørgen was discharged.

Edith Rosen’s parents were long gone. Their daughter was an only child, and Louise worked out that she must have just turned sixty-seven.

“I’m driving up to northern Zealand to speak with the old neighbor,” she told Eik. “And maybe you can try charming your way to an interview with cranky Lillian in the meantime?”

He smiled at her.

“I can charm anyone.”

F
ROM THE ROAD
, the summer house looked like a dark cigar box with tiny windows. It was situated on a large, natural plot facing out to a field where a herd of Icelandic horses walked around, swatting their tails to keep away the flies.

As she walked through the gate, Louise saw a figure dressed in blue at the back of the large yard.

“Hello,” she called, walking down the garden path toward the house. She had to call out a couple of times before the
lady turned and hesitantly walked toward her with a basket in hand.

Louise had gone through a McDonald’s drive-through on the way there. A Coke and two cheeseburgers had settled her stomach, and she was slowly regaining her inner balance as well.

“My name is Louise Rick,” she said, holding out her hand and explaining who she was. In the same breath, she apologized for interrupting Edith Rosen’s gardening.

The woman had pulled her almost white hair back into a ponytail, which hung limply down the back of her loose dress.