The Forgotten Girls (8 page)

“We think your daughter was alive until last Thursday. Unfortunately, Mr. Andersen, we don’t know where she’s been
staying or why she vanished from the system all those years ago—or how it was even possible.”

She had briefly considered showing him the death certificate in her bag, but now felt it unnecessary.

“Then she’s going to be laid to rest next to her mother,” he said. A small smile played at the corner of his mouth before he suddenly turned serious once again. “But what about my Mette, then, what became of her? Is she not dead, either?”

He looked at them with concern.

Louise gazed at the floor, unsure how to reply.

“She couldn’t possibly make it on her own; especially not without her sister. She became so agitated without Lise.”

The father nodded to himself. “I have to find her,” he mumbled. “I need to know if she’s still alive, too.”

V
IGGO
A
NDERSEN WALKED
them to the front door and opened it so they could avoid the dog.

“We’re so sorry for coming here and opening old wounds,” Louise said as they stood in the courtyard.

“Don’t be,” he replied, shaking his head. “I’m glad you came. Maybe now I can make up for some of what I’ve done. It’s always been hard for me to accept that I let them talk me into letting down my girls.”

He shook his head a little.

“They were always called Lisemette,” he said with a small smile. “The two of them belonged together even though they had different dispositions. Lise was the courageous one; the one to take the lead and take care of her sister. Mette was less independent but, like I said, she was in a worse state.”

He chuckled quietly.

“But there was never any doubt about her feelings when she flung her arms around you and held on.”

Then he caught himself and looked down.

“Could they have been alive all these years while I walked around believing they were dead?” he said as they reached the car. “Where have they been? What happened? It just seems incomprehensible…”

Louise took his hand.

“I know; it does. This has to be so difficult. We need to ask you to go to the Department of Forensic Medicine to identify your daughter,” she said. “So we can confirm that it is, in fact, her.”

“Of course,” he said quickly. “And maybe I can arrange the funeral?”

“I certainly don’t see a problem with that.” Louise smiled before saying good-bye and getting in the car.

T
HEY WERE BOTH
quiet as they drove back on the freeway, until Louise’s cell phone started ringing.

“No, don’t bring raw food,” she said after putting the headset on. Camilla was in Copenhagen and had dropped Markus off at home with Jonas. Now she was offering to take care of dinner. “Melvin is making rissoles; I’m sure you’re welcome to join us.”

Louise felt like she needed to shake off the visit to Lisemette’s father before she got back to Frederiksberg if there was to be any chance of her being enjoyable company.

“And who’s Melvin, then?” Eik asked.

Louise turned off Kalvebod Quay and drove past the central post office without answering.

“I was just under the impression that you lived alone with your foster son,” he mumbled and got out his pack of cigarettes so he could sneak a few puffs.

She parked by the curb, trying to refrain from reacting to the fact that he had obviously been checking up on her. She definitely had not told him any of that herself.

“Melvin is our downstairs neighbor,” she answered, getting out of the car. “He’s seventy-five, and today is his turn to cook.”

“You live in a commune?” he asked with respect in his voice as he tucked his lighter in his pocket.

She laughed and shook her head. “Not at all. We just help each other out to make things run more smoothly. Melvin lends a hand with the practical stuff, and Jonas and I help him keep the loneliness at bay.”

“Well, no wonder there’s no room for a man in your life.”

Louise stopped. “What makes you say that?”

“What?”

“That there’s no room for a man in my life? Do people talk about that?”

He shook his head innocently.

“Who said that?” she demanded to know. “Was it Hanne?”

“Oh, stop it, it wasn’t meant as an insult,” he shouted after her as Louise turned her back on him and walked away. She hated being exposed and questioned; hated that Eik knew her private business after only a couple of days.

I
T WAS LATE
, so instead of going back up to the office, she walked over to her bicycle while she called the Department of Forensic Medicine to ask if they had set up an appointment with Lise Andersen’s father.

“Actually, he’s already on his way,” Flemming Larsen informed her. He also reported that one of her colleagues from the Search Department had tried to track down the woman’s
dental records now that they had her civil registration number. “No luck, though,” he lamented. “In fact, they haven’t found anything. It would have been a different story had she been registered as dead within the last ten or fifteen years. Then there’d have been a better chance of the information still being there.”

“I’m pretty sure he’ll be able to identify her,” Louise said. She asked Flemming to call her once Viggo Andersen had been to see his daughter.

“I’ll accompany him to the viewing room myself,” the medical examiner said. “If he’s the least bit unsure, I’ll be able to tell and then I’ll be sure to react.”

Louise thanked him and got on her bike to go home.

M
ELVIN HAD MADE
scalloped peas and carrots fresh from Grete Milling’s greenhouse. Louise smiled at him, appreciating the fact that he went all-out when he was in charge of dinner.

“If only I had a greenhouse like that,” he sighed and put the last rissoles in the pan.

“Maybe you could apply for permission to put one up in the yard,” Camilla suggested as she handed him a glass of white wine from a bottle she had brought. “It’s pretty big.”

“But that’s not the same,” Melvin mumbled while flipping the breaded meat.

“Or you could have your own vegetable garden at my place,” Camilla offered. “There’s plenty of room, that’s for sure. But I’m not going to take care of it for you.”

“That’s the whole point of it, though,” he retorted, “unwinding and caring for the things that grow. Nancy was always so good at that.”

Since meeting Grete Milling, he had been mentioning his
late wife less frequently but when he did, his voice always filled with love even though it had felt like forever since they had lived together. For the last several years of her life, Nancy had been in a coma at a nursing home, but Melvin had gone every day to see her.

“Will you tell the boys that dinner’s ready?” he asked, nodding toward the closed door to Jonas’s room.

Louise walked over and knocked. They had been in there since she got home, and Melvin had only seen them when they came out to ask if there were any more Popsicles in the freezer.

There was a draft from the open window. Louise was a bit puzzled. “Are you guys smoking in here?” She walked over to close it.

Markus was sitting on the bed and shook his head indignantly, offended that she would even ask.

Jonas was practically touching his nose to the screen as if on another planet and he clearly was not paying attention.

“Yeaaah!” he suddenly shouted, jumping up. “Ten thousand hits! Ten thousand people have listened to my new song!”

He pounded Louise on the shoulder and high-fived his friend on the bed.

Markus got up, and Louise joined them in looking at the YouTube page where Jonas had uploaded some of his own music.

“But they don’t even know you, so how do they find you?” she asked, shaking her head.

“Jonas has a crazy-high rating,” Markus said approvingly.

“It’s because the link to the song gets passed around,” Jonas explained. “People who like it share it, and that’s how it spreads.”

“Holy crap, it keeps going up,” Markus pointed out and sat down in front of the screen. “There’s two more now.”

“Are you guys coming?” Melvin called from the kitchen.

“I put the song on Facebook, too, and yesterday I had over two hundred comments and they were from people from all over the world,” Jonas explained once they were all seated around the table.

Louise smiled, pleased that Jonas was so absorbed in something that clearly made him happy. There had been a period when he’d been having problems with the other boys at school, who teased him because he’d lost both of his parents. Louise had found it difficult to deal with the cruelty of the kids’ teasing, and Jonas had tried to spare her by keeping it to himself until he ended up in the emergency room with a split eyebrow after a fight in the schoolyard.

“Maybe you could play something at my wedding,” Camilla said with a smile.

Louise appreciated Camilla’s generosity, even if her friend was mostly being polite. She looked forward to being the proud mama when Jonas performed a song or two on the big day.

“D
O YOU THINK
they’re smoking?” Louise asked after dinner when the boys had once again closed the door behind them. She looked at Camilla.

“Are you nuts? They’re way too young,” her friend dismissed. “They’re barely teenagers.”

Louise laughed. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Isn’t that usually when they start doing things like that?”

“I don’t think ‘usually’ plays much of a part when you’re that age,” Melvin chipped in, sneaking another half rissole onto his plate. “The whole smoking and drinking thing seems like it just starts when you’re ready. I was twelve when I lit up my first cigarette.”

“Well, that makes you an excellent role model then,” Louise said, hoping that her neighbor hadn’t been entertaining Jonas with too many stories of his youth.

“H
OW’S THE REMODELING
coming along?” Louise asked once they had cleared the table and were having coffee. Before Melvin went back downstairs, he had left a handful of Quality Street chocolates on the table and extended an invitation from Grete Milling to Louise and Jonas to come along to Dragør that Sunday.

Camilla shrugged and grabbed a piece of chocolate.

“Frederik wasn’t exactly happy to hear that I’d fired the workers. He’d prefer everything to run smoothly of course, but I’m simply not going to put up with people blowing off a deal,” she huffed. “Just because they think they’ve got you cornered and you need the job finished no matter how they behave.”

“Have you found someone else to take over?”

Camilla shook her head.

“The ones we talked to have an eight-week waiting list—minimum.”

“So I guess you’ll have to rehire the other ones so they can finish,” Louise said with a small smile.

“Are you crazy? No way! I won’t let them set foot in my house again,” Camilla sputtered. “If we can’t find anyone else to do the work, I’ll put up a tent in the yard. Or hire some Polacks. They don’t spend half their working hours reading the paper and drinking Coke, either.”

Louise couldn’t help but laugh. “That’ll look great on the front page when it’s revealed that the Sachs-Smith family uses underpaid labor.”

“We don’t have to underpay them just because they’re
foreigners,” her friend snapped irritably. Then she cracked a smile herself when she said that she was actually considering overpaying them.

She picked out another chocolate wrapped in glittery red foil.

“But it’s all a mess,” she admitted, folding the foil into a tiny square. “The contractor—the guy from Hvalsø—came up the same evening that I’d fired them to hand over a huge bill, which also included all of the work they hadn’t done. I guess he had no problem finding the time for that,” she said, shaking her head.

Camilla finished her coffee and got up to gather up her things. She called for Markus and told him it was time to go.

“I’m in the bathroom,” he called back.

“You could just postpone the wedding. That way you’d have more time to get everything in place,” Louise suggested.

“We could, but I don’t want to. If I’m getting married, it has to be this summer. I’m crazy about him. I’ve never felt such a sense of belonging with someone as I do with him,” she declared. “We’re going to have a big, amazing summer wedding, dancing around barefoot in the yard and spending our wedding night on a mattress beneath the apple trees with candlelight and plenty of champagne.”

In the beginning Louise had considered the relationship between her friend and Frederik Sachs-Smith a passing fling, but it seemed that Camilla had found the love of her life. It would be interesting to see how two such different lives could be combined, she thought. Her friend, the journalist, who had lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the city and had always taken care of herself and devoted herself to her own interests. And the rich guy who had sat on the deck by his pool in California, writing his film scripts and never wanting for anything.
In addition to the family money from Termo-Lux, he had built a considerable fortune by investing wisely, and he had been a bachelor until Camilla entered the picture.

Markus’s shouting roused Louise from her thoughts. She could only hope her friend knew exactly what she was doing.

Are you coming?” Markus demanded of his mother from the entrance hall.

C
ONGRATULATIONS
,” R
AGNER
R
ØNHOLT
exclaimed from the doorway the following morning. “Good job with the identification. Now we can close the case.”

He smiled approvingly at Louise and went on: “I’ve gotten ahold of Lars Jørgensen’s résumé, and I intend to have him over for a talk later this week.”

Louise put her hand up to make her boss stop.

“We’re not ready to close the case,” she corrected him. “Lise Andersen has been missing for thirty-one years without anyone knowing it. The case has only just been opened.”

“But now that she’s been found and identified, her past is no longer relevant to us,” he maintained.

She looked at him in surprise while he ran his hand over his well-groomed beard.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “If this special unit is to be justified, it is relevant to find out what’s happened in
this woman’s life since a false death certificate was issued in 1980.”

Eik walked through the door, eyes squinting and hair unruly, and she gave him a quick nod.

“Weren’t we supposed to look at the cases that can’t be classified as standard disappearance cases?”

“Exactly,” Rønholt said. “Your job is to focus on missing person cases where we suspect that a crime is involved. And this woman is no longer missing.”

“Maybe so,” she replied. “But I want to know what happened to Lisemette. How can there be a death certificate when she only just died last week? That seems suspicious to me.”

“And how come nobody’s missed her since the accident in the woods?” Eik cut in. “We know that she’d been sexually intimate with a man just before she died. Someone knows about her.”

“The case is closed,” Rønholt insisted, and Louise felt flushed with anger as he went on: “Make sure it gets archived correctly in the system that’s been set up for the new department.”

As he was about to leave, she stood up.

“We can’t file it until we know what happened to the twin sisters,” she tried. “What about the other one; where is she? Her death certificate may have been forged as well.”

“We have other cases piling up,” was his reply. “And one case closed means one less in the pile.”

L
OUISE SLAMMED THE
door behind him and walked over to the window. She crossed her arms. If it turned out that she had quit the Homicide Department for a job that was only about closing and archiving cases, it would be the mistake of a lifetime. The anger felt like a stab in her chest, and she paused for a moment before she was able to turn around and sit down again.

“That’s his weakness,” Eik said after she sat down. “Rønholt tends to be a bit rigid once the workload starts to grow, and he wants to please management by showing results.”

“I couldn’t care less about who he’s trying to please,” Louise said sourly. “It’s bad practice to close a case before it’s finished. If that’s how it’s going to be then I won’t be at the helm.”

“I agree.” He put his feet up on the desk. “I suggest we get Viggo Andersen to file a missing person report for Mette. Then we have a case and we can continue.”

Louise looked at him with surprise and nodded approvingly. But then she hesitated. “Can you file a missing person report when there’s a death certificate?”

Eik folded his hands behind his head. “If we can show the probability that she didn’t pass away back then, either, then I should think so.”

Her face turned pensive. “The undertaker…” she said. “The undertaker who arranged the funerals at Eliselund. I’ll call Viggo Andersen and suggest that he have a talk with him.”