The Forgotten Girls (21 page)

“But I wasn’t expecting anyone at all,” she said apologetically, running her hand somewhat feverishly down her old dress, which was stained from dirt and green sap.

“It’s perfectly all right. I should have called,” Louise hurried to say. She knew very well that information was never given quite as freely if people had time to prepare for the conversation. “Growing up, you lived with your parents in a villa in Rungsted?”

Edith Rosen nodded uncertainly, clearly unable to figure out where the police officer was trying to go with that. “Yes,” she answered hesitantly. “That was the house where I was born.”

“Do you remember the Parkovs who lived in the house next door?”

“I remember them,” she acknowledged.

“There was an incident with their son, Jørgen, which made your father file a police report,” Louise continued. Then she fell silent as she saw the color drain from Edith Rosen’s face.

“Let’s go inside, shall we?” the older lady asked. “I need to sit down.”

Louise supported her as they walked toward the door together. A cat slipped out as they opened the door and stepped
into a small kitchen with flowered wallpaper and laundry in the sink.

They sat down and Louise went straight to the point. “Did he assault you?” she asked.

The woman’s eyes were shiny. She nodded quickly and then looked away when Louise asked her to tell her about the incident.

“It wasn’t an incident,” she finally said, working herself up to look at Louise.

“No, I can see that the report was retracted…”

“It was the beginning of the nightmare of my life,” the woman continued, her voice cracking, her shoulders starting to shake.

Her crying sounded like the whimper of a small child. The eerie, long sounds of lament sent shivers down Louise’s spine, and she moved her chair closer to the table, placing her hand over the woman’s. They sat like that for a little while before Edith Rosen cleared her throat and looked up.

“Will you tell me what happened?” Louise asked. “I need to know.”

She could tell that Edith Rosen was trying, but then the eerie wailing started again. The sound was like a knife to the heart, and Louise was shocked at the still-intense reaction to something that had happened more than fifty years ago. She tried once again to comfort the woman, thinking that she had obviously never been able to put the incident behind her, even though her father had apparently regretted going to the police.

Louise got up and got a glass, which she filled from the tap and placed on the table.

“Please, have a drink,” she suggested.

The older woman’s lungs whistled and Louise worried for a
second that she couldn’t breathe or that perhaps she was having a heart attack. But then Edith Rosen straightened herself up, holding on to the tabletop as if she needed a fixed point. She wiped her face on her dress sleeve and drank a little water.

“I always knew it would come out one day,” she whispered and looked at Louise with despairing eyes. “Something like that haunts you for the rest of your life.”

“What happened?” Louise asked, but she could tell that Edith Rosen wasn’t listening.

“I wonder whatever happened to Bodil?” she mumbled quietly.

“She and Jørgen are living together by a forest down on central Zealand.”

“That’s not possible!” Edith Rosen exclaimed, with aggression.

Louise jumped, surprised at the fierce outburst, and tried to interpret the woman’s facial expression now that her eyes had finally come back to life.

“Why wouldn’t they be?” she asked calmly.

“Bodil would never do that,” she answered firmly. “Never.”

They looked at each other for a minute.

“So he’s still alive then,” Edith Rosen concluded.

Then she folded her hands in front of her, suddenly sad.

“Poor Bodil had her life ruined as well.”

Her voice rose and fell as if pulled from the fog of the past. Louise shivered.

“They’re really living together?”

Louise nodded.

“You know what evil is?” Edith Rosen whispered, looking at some point above Louise’s head. “It’s when fate corrupts and destroys a relationship between two people, and then forces them to live together.”

“If I’m to understand a word of what you’re saying, you’ll
have to tell me what happened back then,” Louise cut in matter-of-factly.

“And he’s still alive?” Edith Rosen repeated, holding Louise’s gaze.

She nodded patiently and repeated that so was Bodil.

“No,” Edith Rosen broke in, suddenly short-tempered. “The Bodil that I knew is no longer alive.”

“Please just tell me what happened,” Louise asked. She was beginning to doubt whether the woman was all there.

Edith Rosen’s hands fluttered around a little as she tried to collect herself.

“When Bodil was nine years old, her brother was five,” she began at last, staring straight ahead, focusing. “Bodil would pick him up from preschool on her way home from school.”

She spoke more calmly now, but her hands were still in motion.

“I attended the same preschool, and some days she would bring me along with them when my mother was at the hairdresser’s or shopping. We had to cross two residential streets. It wasn’t a very long walk but one day Jørgen outpaced her. He loved cars—there weren’t that many of them back then—and he had spotted one that he wanted to see before it disappeared.”

Louise let her be as she fell silent and got lost in her own thoughts.

“Bodil didn’t have a chance to stop him before he stepped into the road,” she went on. “Just then, another car came around the corner and hit him.”

“It was a traffic accident?” Louise exclaimed in surprise. She could tell from the look on Edith Rosen’s face that she didn’t know what Louise was referring to.

“It was so frightening,” Edith Rosen whispered. “None of us kids understood how a boy that we all knew could get picked
up by an ambulance and then come back from the hospital a completely different person.”

She shook her head.

“It didn’t look like he was really hurt. There wasn’t even any blood,” she explained. “He just fell down when the car hit him but it didn’t run him over.”

“He must have been hit in a very unlucky way,” Louise said, aware that it took very little to damage the frontal lobes.

Edith Rosen got up and walked to a kitchen cupboard, where she got out a bottle with a patent stopper. She seemed to be slowly regaining her composure, and Louise accepted her offer of a glass of homemade elderflower juice.

“I can’t tell you exactly when the nightmare began,” Edith Rosen admitted when they were seated across from each other once again. “I guess Jørgen was fourteen back then so Bodil must have been eighteen. But one day she was suddenly gone. She left school even though she was a straight-A student. People said that their mother knew what went on and she had told Bodil that she ought to be thankful that she wasn’t the one who had been hit by the car. I guess it was a teacher who helped her secure a maid’s position through the city with a doctor at Ebberødgård in Birkerød. But by then Jørgen had already been next door to see me, so I knew what her homeroom teacher had saved her from.”

She pressed her lips together. Her mouth was thin as both corners twitched, but she didn’t succeed in holding back the tears.

“I was afraid to tell anyone,” she whispered. “But my parents found out and went to see the merchant. My father also went to the police and he demanded that Jørgen be sent away since his parents were unable to control him.”

“But later he retracted the report?” Louise asked.

Edith Rosen nodded. “That was part of the deal that my
father made with the merchant. If they sent Jørgen away, the report would be retracted.”

“What about Bodil; did she come back home then?”

“I never saw her again. I don’t even know if she had the chance to see her father again. The merchant died four years later, and then his wife brought Jørgen home.”

Her chin quivered.

“It started again the very next day after he returned,” she stammered, trying to keep her head high.

Louise’s breath caught. Afraid she would stutter, she took a moment to compose her thoughts before speaking. “And then you moved?” she asked.

Edith Rosen nodded. “And then we moved,” she repeated.

When Louise’s cell phone started ringing in her bag, she realized she’d been sitting in Edith Rosen’s kitchen for two hours. She took Eik’s call.

“Lillian Johansen is here, eager to tell us what went on at Eliselund. It turns out that the twins disappeared while she was on duty.”

“Why did you bring her in?” Louise asked quietly. She could tell that Eik had walked out into the hallway.

“Because I had to arrest her and threaten to charge her with withholding information of significant importance to the investigation.”

“Eik, damn it!” Louise exclaimed. “You’re running the risk of a liability suit.”

She sighed and smiled apologetically to Edith Rosen.

“I’ll just wrap things up here and then I’ll head back,” she told Eik.

L
OUISE WAITED IMPATIENTLY
in the traffic jam on the freeway by Hørsholm. She cursed rush-hour traffic, and the way back from Horneby suddenly seemed very long. She also felt guilty about Edith Rosen. She had thanked her for their conversation and apologized for raking up the past, but she had left her with wounds that were unlikely to ever heal.

Considering what she had learned, she was inclined to agree with the former neighbor that it seemed unlikely that Bodil would choose to live with her brother of her own free will. Louise could think of only one thing that could tie the two siblings together: Bodil feeling enough guilt at not having looked after her younger brother well enough when walking him home from preschool.

Louise noted that Melvin had called a couple of times while she had been sitting in the flowered kitchen. She might as well
take advantage of the traffic standstill to tackle the conversation that she had put off a bit too long.

“The sales contract is all ready to go,” said her downstairs neighbor, sounding so pleased that the objections caught in Louise’s throat.

“You bought it?” she said instead.

“No,
we
bought a community garden lot,” he corrected her, explaining that she just needed to sign the papers as well. “I’ve got it all right here. I promised Jonas that we’ll go take a look at the ‘mansion’ tonight. He just got back from Roskilde.”

Louise took a deep breath. She hadn’t even had a chance to see the garden yet. But it was her own fault that she had not backed out in time.

“There’s new wiring and a new bathroom,” Melvin said, adding that they would probably need to paint the kitchen and living room. “But that’s up to you.”

His enthusiasm made her smile.

“And the garden is amazing,” he continued dreamily. “There are berries and potatoes and herbs…”

“I hope there’s a bit of grass, too?” Louise interjected, suddenly worried that there might not be any room for her sunbed.

“Plenty of grass,” he reassured her. “And it’s positioned perfectly so there’s sun all day and even in the evening.”

“I can’t wait to see it,” Louise said, catching his excitement, and thought: Why shouldn’t she have a community garden? She pulled into the passing lane once traffic finally started moving again and told him that she would sign it as soon as she got home.

“Just go ahead and bring Jonas out there. I’ll probably be home kind of late today.”

W
HEN
L
OUISE WALKED
into the Rathole, Lillian Johansen was sitting on a chair, pressed up against the wall. It was quite obvious that she hadn’t the slightest desire to speak with the police. Eik sat by his desk, his hands folded in front of him.

They had clearly been waiting for her, so Louise quickly pulled off her sweater and said hello to the woman who had been so unsympathetic the first time she called Eliselund.

“Lillian worked down there the last year that the twins lived there, and she just told me that she looked after them while they were admitted to the sick ward for pneumonia in February.”

Eik turned his attention to the sullen woman in the guest chair.

“Could you please repeat what happened the last evening?”

He had turned the blinds to let in only a thin stripe of daylight. In front of Lillian was an untouched coffee cup and a glass of water.

The heavyset woman folded her arms across her chest with obvious animosity.

“There was nothing that you could have done differently,” Eik helped out. “You were only a student at the time.”

She still didn’t say anything; just sat there quietly, staring straight ahead.

They waited for a while for her to start talking, until Eik ran out of patience.

“Before you got here,” he began, “Lillian told me that she found it odd that the girls had been admitted to the section of the sick ward that was isolated in the basement. Because neither of them seemed particularly affected by pneumonia. They had neither symptoms nor a temperature and when she pointed
this out to Bodil Parkov, she was told to leave the basement and take over the restroom task in the men’s wing instead, making sure that the worst-off patients got to use the restroom.”

Louise reached for an empty cup and poured herself some coffee. “Do you want some?” she asked, offering it to Lillian.

The woman shook her head and looked down at the table.

“The night that the twins died, the sick ward in the basement was locked up. Nobody aside from Parkov and the consultant doctor had access, which meant that they took the night shift themselves. The next morning, the flag was flying at half-mast and nobody saw the twins again. They didn’t see them leave the place, either.”

“Eik,” Louise cut in. “Why don’t we let Lillian tell us what happened now?”

He fell silent and shot her an annoyed look. Then he nodded to Lillian, signaling for her to go on, but still nothing happened and so they waited once again. Eik made an approach to break the silence several times but Louise shut him up with a stern look.

They sat like that for nine minutes, in complete silence. Louise picked at her frayed cuticles, occasionally shooting a quick glance at Lillian until she noticed that tears had started rolling down the woman’s plump cheeks. She looked quickly at Eik, who was leaning back; his hands folded behind his head. He looked like he might have dozed off.

“At first I didn’t know what went on when they locked up the section down there,” Lillian began flatly. “And I couldn’t tell you how long the others had known about it. In any event, they stayed away when the door was barred.”

Louise leaned in and Eik reached for his notepad.
Maybe he hadn’t been asleep after all
, she thought.

“One evening I had gone down there to find the case file for
a patient who was being transferred to the University Hospital of Copenhagen the next day,” she said.

“While the twins were admitted?” Louise asked, afraid to interrupt.

“No,” Lillian answered, wringing her hands. “This was long before that.”

For a moment it looked like she might stall again but then suddenly she continued, her words almost like a burst of anger as she looked up.

“They were walking down the hall with him,” she said. “Parkov and the doctor held him between them as they came out of the bathroom. He was naked and they led him to the rearmost sickroom, which we called the epidemic room.”

She seemed ill at ease as she looked away, working herself up to continue.

“In all my time, that room was never in use. It was always empty, reserved for emergency situations. I was so shocked because I had never seen him before even though I was on the permanent day shift in the men’s section.”

“Who was it?” Eik asked, placing a match between his teeth.

“Well, I didn’t know this at the time but later I was told that it was Parkov’s brother. She let him live down there, and the consultant doctor treated him. At first it was all very hush-hush and nobody dared say anything but then we got used to it. We never saw him; he had his meals brought down there and didn’t mingle with the other residents, but we heard the sounds.”

She closed her eyes and her face contracted. It looked as if it was all coming back to her, and she started rocking from side to side in torment.

“They let him in with the girls who were ill. The ones who were admitted to the sick ward,” she whispered and took a heavy breath. “If you had an evening shift in the hospital wing,
you could sometimes hear the sounds. But we never said anything. We didn’t dare—not even the more senior staff. So it remained an unspoken thing.”

She straightened herself up.

“And it should stay that way,” she said.

“Why?” Eik exclaimed. The angry line across his forehead made it clear that he disagreed.

Lillian Johansen turned toward him. “Because we were all to blame. Bodil Parkov was a tough leader but we knew what went on and should have stepped in. This made us party to the crimes that took place. And you shouldn’t start exposing someone after so many years.”

“You all turned a blind eye,” Eik declared, indignantly spitting out his match. “Maybe because you knew that the mentally handicapped girls wouldn’t tell. Or was it because they had no next of kin to file a complaint?”

“Stop,” Louise cut him off sternly and thought about sending him out of the room.

“It’s been over thirty years,” Lillian said, defending herself. “Things were different back then, and the consultant doctor objected to the charges that were raised against Parkov. He denied that the assaults happened. And then in the end her brother was removed.”

“When was that?” Louise asked.

“It was just before the thing with the twins. Maybe a week or two earlier.”

“So you mean to say that Bodil Parkov’s brother was staying at Eliselund all the time until she quit and subsequently left the place?”

Lillian nodded.

“And on the day that she quit, the girls disappeared?” Eik took over, already standing up.

Lillian Johansen sat motionless, her eyes following him as he put on his leather jacket and grabbed his car keys. “Maybe we should have pursued it after the doctor killed himself but he was the one responsible for the sick ward, so the case was allowed to die with him.”

“And nobody cared to know what had become of Lise and Mette?” Louise concluded.

Then she picked up her sweater to follow Eik out the door.

“The forgotten girls were left to their own devices from the beginning anyway so what were we supposed to do?” Lillian mumbled.

Louise spun around in the doorway, only barely stopping herself from yelling at her.

“That’s where you’re mistaken,” she said angrily. “Those two girls were not forgotten from the beginning. Their father was urged to forget them. He was told to stay away, and that was apparently the case with many of the children and adults who had no contact with their families. They were left to their own devices because they were different and were stowed away in a place where the only concern was how to make it easy to look after them. But you were the ones who were supposed to take an interest in them. Because they didn’t have anyone else…”

The words and the anger bubbled up inside, and she struggled to keep from exploding. Instead she turned her back on Lillian and left the office.