Dead Souls

by Elsebeth Egholm

  Images from their childhood danced to the rhythm of the small flame. They had grown up together at Titan Care Home where physical punishments were the order of the day. He had often thought it was the torture that broke My and turned her into what she was, but the doctors had a medical diagnosis for her. A form of autism, they said. Funny how such a small, anaemic word had been used to explain why My was like no one else in the whole world.

  No one could move like My, who always wore her long coat and a woollen hat on her head with a hobbling dignity. She had a limp and could reel off crazy sentences that never finished, embroidered with puns and rhymes and plenty of curses and swearing. Her figure was elfin, her hair mousy brown and thin. Her eyes always asked questions he couldn’t answer.

  And now, she was up there. That was the feeling he got whenever he lay looking up at the starry sky. Perhaps he had a kind of belief after all.

  Suddenly something moved on the periphery of his vision. He heard a rustling noise.

  ‘Kaj?’

  But it wasn’t the dog. A figure approached him. Long coat flapping at the sides. The wind caught the hair escaping from the edges of the beanie. He blinked. My?

  He was about to say her name, but he held it inside him as he watched the human figure moving closer and closer in the glow from the few flickering candles.

  ‘I thought I would find you here,’ the voice said.

  ‘Miriam!’

  ‘God, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  She came up to him and kissed him on the cheek, and he realised that she was very much flesh and blood.

  ‘What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night!’

  She eyed him sharply.

  ‘It’s only eleven o’clock. I thought you might want to make me some coffee. Or perhaps you’ve got a rendezvous?’

  He shook his head and called Kaj. He looked up. It had started drizzling again.

  ‘I hope you’ve got a car.’

  2

  HE HADN’T SEEN Miriam since the winter. In the interim he had decided he had probably seen her for the last time. Back in January, things had happened that had made him angry and had shaken his belief that they would ever speak again. And now she was sitting on his sofa with her stockinged feet tucked up underneath her and her make-up smudged from the shower they had been caught in before they reached her little tin can of a car.

  ‘You look good,’ she said to the teacup she was cradling in her hands. ‘Do you miss her very much?’

  ‘My?’

  ‘No, I don’t need to ask about her. I mean Felix.’

  He shrugged. He wasn’t ready to discuss Felix with her. She couldn’t just waltz in after several months of silence thinking their former intimacy was still intact.

  He could see that she understood. She drank her tea and hid her gaze in the steam.

  ‘Why are you here?’ he asked. ‘What do you want from me?’

  He was fond of Miriam, but he also had to be careful. She had already shown him once that she put money and security before friendship. But she had changed, he had to admit. There was a new earnestness to her. Her curvy figure seemed thinner, almost emaciated, but she was still attractive and sexy, and the memory of her body would always be part of him.

  ‘I had a visitor the other day,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  Miriam and Lulu ran their own brothel in Anholtsgade in Aarhus. If they didn’t have daily visitors something was wrong.

  ‘It was a woman.’

  ‘Piquant.’

  ‘Stop it, Peter.’

  She banged down her cup on the table. He saw that for once she wasn’t wearing nail varnish. He had never seen her in jeans either. It was always corsets and short skirts with Miriam, and heels like stilts.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘My’s mother.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘How did My’s mother know where to find you?’

  Now it was her turn to shrug.

  ‘I’m in the phone book.’

  ‘Only if you have a name.’

  ‘I do have a name.’

  My’s mother. The thought was alien. Neither of them had had parents. Or at least, not parents who wanted them. Not even someone to bring them birthday presents or take them on picnics.

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘Well, what do you think?’

  His astonishment was replaced by anger when the truth dawned on him. He hated it when parents were suddenly overcome by remorse and the urge to pour love over their now adult children whom they had quite happily dumped on others for their entire childhood. He only had to think of his own mother. She was a journalist in Aarhus and if he let her she would be there, trying to mother him, faster than she could write a tabloid headline. Ridiculous, seeing as she had given him up at birth and hadn’t seen him for almost thirty years.

  ‘Don’t tell me she was looking for her lost daughter.’

  ‘Oh, yes, she wanted to know about My,’ Miriam said. ‘She wanted to track her down and tell her she had siblings. Half siblings,’ she corrected herself.

  ‘Find My? But didn’t she know what happened?’

  Miriam’s voice went hoarse.

  ‘Did she know that her daughter was dead and had been found hanging from a tree? No, Peter, she didn’t. They don’t give you that kind of information when you give up your child for adoption.’

  She looked at him and collected herself. He remembered that Miriam had given birth once. A long time ago. She had told him that when she was young, she had been a drug addict and had given birth to a child who had died at birth. It still haunted her.

  ‘I suppose there’s a reason for that,’ he said. ‘She was no longer My’s mother.’ He corrected himself: ‘She didn’t want to be My’s mother.’

  Miriam rolled her eyes up to his ceiling, which needed a lick of paint.

  ‘Listen to yourself! Aren’t you on your high horse, Peter? You don’t know the whole story. You’ve no idea what made her let My go.’

  He got up and started pacing the living room. The dog lifted its head and sent him an anxious look. He was seething on the inside. There were always so many excuses for leaving children in the lurch. But it was pointless discussing this with Miriam, whose heart beat for everything from puppies to serial killers.

  ‘Ah well, now she knows she can be on her merry way again.’

  ‘She’d like to meet you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘She’d also like to see My’s grave and leave some flowers.’

  ‘Jesus wept!’

  Miriam leaned forward and caught his eye. She said softly:

  ‘And then she would like My to be transferred to a cemetery close to Aarhus where she lives.’

  He knew it was inappropriate, but no other expression occurred to him to describe how he felt about that announcement:

  ‘Over my dead body!’

  3

  ‘BUT COULDN’T SHE have gone . . .?’

  Mark Bille Hansen suddenly found it hard to imagine where a nun would go if she were to go missing. Home? Into town? Dancing . . .? Possible scenarios appeared in his mind and not all of them could be shared with the worried abbess who had called Grenå police station.

  Fortunately, it appeared that Sister Dolores, as she called herself, had a sense of humour despite her obvious concern.

  ‘No,’ she said, her voice laden with irony. ‘She hasn’t eloped with the gardener, she hasn’t gone clubbing or joined a travelling circus, nor is she offering kisses for ten kroner on the high street because she’s getting married in the morning. She’s gone. Disappeared.’

  ‘Since last night, did you say, Sister Dolores?’

  How do you address an abbess? He decided to stick with Sister Dolores.

  ‘At five in the afternoon she went to pick some herbs in the garden.’

  ‘It was raining,’ he reminded her.

  She resorted to
sarcasm again.

  ‘She was wearing her water-repellent, super-nun habit. And her nun-wellies.’

  He faltered and felt well and truly put in his place; the conversation was going from bad to worse:

  ‘We’re not freaks,’ the voice said more patiently, as if talking to a child. ‘We’re human beings who have made important life decisions. But we live our daily lives like most other people. We go out into the rain to fetch herbs and we know it won’t help to pray to God for five minutes’ respite so we can get back inside without getting our feet wet.’

  Sister Dolores sighed audibly.

  ‘We get wet. Just like everybody else. And sometimes we catch a cold.’

  ‘And sometimes you go missing,’ Mark said.

  A short pause followed, the air seeming to quiver.

  ‘This is the first time. It has never happened before.’

  Mark was reminded of the old joke about the two spinsters who had been brought up never to go outside and never to let men indoors. Until by some miracle one of them married the postman and sent the other a postcard from her honeymoon with the words: Let the pussy cat out!

  However, it was probably not the right time to tell this joke. Sister Dolores clearly had a sense of humour, but this would be going a bit too far.

  He looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock. In normal circumstances he would have given it more time – unless it was winter and minus 13° outside. Young women went missing and then they came back again, he knew that from experience. But it was clearly different with nuns.

  ‘I’d better drop by. Is now a good time?’

  ‘Ten minutes ago would have been better, but it’ll have to do.’

  Mark was familiar with the seventeenth-century convent in Sostrup. Once upon a time, the property had been owned by the Skeel family. In the Djursland of his childhood the convent had merely been part of the landscape, with its large gate and four wings with a tower and a moat, useful for playing war games. In town he had sometimes seen white-clad figures who reminded him of ghosts, but apart from that the nuns were just mysterious creatures you rarely saw or heard about.

  He Googled the convent and learned that it had belonged to the Cistercian Order since 1960. In 1999 a new convent, called St Mary’s Abbey, had been built a short distance south-east of the manor house.

  He had never been to the convent on police business, nor had he ever imagined why he might. A couple of stolen prayer books? A sister who had overindulged on the communion wine? It was hard to imagine them at odds with their own laws or society’s. They appeared to live quiet, contemplative lives, minding their own business and tending to the affairs of the convent, and they even had enough energy left over to pray for all the lost souls in the world, including his own.

  As he drove his patrol car over the moat bridge and through the convent gates he couldn’t help feeling a certain gratitude. There was, as far as he knew, no one else who found his miserable, diseased soul worthy of a prayer, although it was sorely in need of it.

  He parked the car and got out, resolving to treat Sister Dolores and her fellow nuns with more respect than he had shown during the telephone conversation.

  ‘Mark Bille Hansen?’

  The woman who said his name walked towards him with such a light tread it was as if she was hovering. Her white habit hovered with her. Only her sturdy black shoes, sticking out from underneath the habit, seemed to be keeping her on the ground.

  ‘This is Sister Beatrice, who has been kind enough to assist me. After all, it’s not every day we have a visit from the law.’

  Sister Beatrice was a totally different type to the hovering abbess. The weight of her body alone kept Beatrice’s feet firmly on the ground. She had a soft, round figure, and even her nun’s habit struggled to conceal her generous bosom. It looked as though she could easily smile or laugh, but at this moment she appeared tormented.

  They set off across the cobbled courtyard between the red convent walls.

  ‘Of course, we don’t live here any more,’ Sister Dolores said. ‘Perhaps you know that we were given money for a new convent some years ago. It’s round the back. The old buildings are used for courses and conferences, but we still have our herb garden down there.’

  She pointed in front of her. ‘That was where she went to pick herbs. Rosemary. Sister Mary was making roast lamb.’

  ‘Sounds delicious,’ he said stupidly. His dinner had been a burger from the takeaway on the corner.

  ‘It was a Friday, so normally we’d have had fish, but it was Sister Mary’s name day.’

  They crossed the section of the moat which lay north of the bridge he had just driven over. Then the sisters led him down to a large, well-kept herb garden, which abounded with the kind of vegetables he always intended to eat but never managed to buy or cook. Vitamin pills had proved to be easier.

  ‘Look. This is where she walked.’

  Sister Dolores pointed to hefty shoe-prints on the ground, but it was hard to distinguish between them. There were also other shoe-prints.

  ‘And she was alone?’

  ‘Who else would be with her?’ Sister Beatrice asked. ‘We’ve done a headcount and we were all together indoors.’

  ‘An outsider, perhaps? Someone attending a conference?’ Mark could see his suggestion did not find favour.

  ‘We found this,’ Sister Dolores said, pointing. ‘We didn’t touch it, obviously.’

  Perhaps even nuns watched CSI on TV, what did he know? Mark looked, but couldn’t immediately see what she meant. Sister Beatrice pointed to some small twigs that looked like spruce.

  ‘Rosemary,’ she said. ‘She must have picked it and then dropped it.’

  He squatted on his haunches next to the little green sprigs and suddenly the situation felt surreal. Herbs . . . nuns . . . He was finding it hard to take this seriously. He hid his smile as he searched the grass around the spilled herbs but found nothing. Then he stood up and a glance at the faces of the two nuns made him feel ashamed. He read equal portions of horror and fear in their expressions, as if they had an insight into a world to which he had no access.

  ‘Did anyone see Sister Melissa go down to the herbs? It was at five o’clock, you said?’

  The abbess shook her head. But Sister Beatrice babbled something, then clasped her hand over her mouth.

  ‘What was that?’ he asked.

  Beatrice lowered her hand.

  ‘The carpenter left at five o’clock. Perhaps he saw something. He was in the music room putting up new door frames . . .’

  ‘There’s maintenance work going on,’ Sister Dolores interjected. ‘Quite a lot of jobs had piled up and we found some money to get it done.’

  ‘What is the name of the carpentry firm?’ Mark asked.

  The abbess looked at Sister Beatrice.

  ‘Now what was it?’

  ‘Rimsø Carpenters,’ Beatrice said. ‘Sometimes there are two of them. Yesterday there was only one. His name’s Peter.’

  ‘Boutrup?’ Mark asked.

  Beatrice smiled. It was the only smile he had seen that day, but that made it all the brighter.

  ‘Do you know him?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Yes. I know him.’

  4

  PETER NOTICED THE police car from a long way off and his first impulse was to turn around and drive back. He hated the police and all forms of authority with every fibre of his being.

  But he had a job to do. Several door frames needed replacing, and he had also promised to look at the gutters as some sections required attention. Later it would be the turn of the roof, but that would take at least two of them. In a couple of days he and Manfred, his boss, would erect scaffolding on the north wing of the convent where several roof tiles needed replacing.

  He dragged his toolbox out and slid the van door shut. He picked up the toolbox and started walking, but was stopped by a familiar voice.

  ‘Peter!’

  Mark Bille Hansen wasn’t his friend, b
ut possibly not his enemy either. He had a feeling it was Mark Bille who had managed to shelve the case of the burned-out motorbikes on the cliff back in August, which Peter regarded as a gesture of friendship.

  However, his heart sank at the sight of the long-haired police officer who was approaching with the abbess while Sister Beatrice stood in the shadow of the convent wall.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  The police officer held out his hand. They looked into each other’s eyes. They were the same height, but Mark Bille’s build was lean and tough. His face was lined, his long hair raven black. He looked more like a modern-day Native American in his boots, jeans and brown leather jacket than a Danish police officer – which was what he was.

  ‘It seems that one of the sisters has gone missing,’ Mark Bille said out of earshot of the others.

  ‘Who?’

  But Peter already knew.

  ‘Someone called Sister Melissa, eighteen years old. She went out to collect herbs at five o’clock. About the same time that you drove home, I’ve been told.’

  Peter only heard the other’s voice as a distant echo. His whole body tingled and his bad conscience throbbed.

  ‘Peter? I’m talking to you.’

  The voice penetrated the sound barrier. Mark Bille eyeballed him. Peter nodded.

  ‘I hear you.’

  It was only a moment, but before he started telling him about yesterday’s incident at the moat, the thought of saying nothing had crossed his mind. Of simply keeping to himself what he had seen. He knew he might end up being dragged into something he didn’t wish to be dragged into. Besides, he felt no joy at helping the police.

  ‘I saw her,’ he said eventually. ‘Someone went up to her in the rain.’

  They walked down to the moat while he told Mark for the second time what he had seen and indicated the place where Melissa had met the stranger.

  ‘And you’re sure it was a man?’

  ‘Quite sure.’