The Forgotten Girls

by Sara Blaedel

  Louise shook her head.

  They took a right at the end of the hallway and continued down yet another long corridor.

  “The archives are down there at the end. It’s actually several rooms that have been combined into one,” the woman informed them. She explained that this part of the basement had at one point been used as a separate sick ward “for those patients who couldn’t be controlled without tying and who needed to be in isolation for a short time to avoid contagion.”

  Louise shuddered and thought for a moment that she could still sense a little of the spirit from that time. But most likely it was only because the moisture made the air stagnant, she thought.

  “Here.” The woman opened a door and showed them into a large room with shelves from floor to ceiling. “You’ll find the years marked under the volumes.”

  She had turned on the ceiling light and was pointing to some white labels affixed to the front side of the shelves.

  “The old institution had a bed capacity of three hundred, but additional beds were often set up so there’d be upward of four hundred patients at a time,” she told them. “As you can see, a lot of destinies have passed through here over the years.”

  Louise looked around. All along one wall, patient records were crammed together so tightly that she could barely make out the dusty green backs of the individual files. They all ranged from 1930 to 1960. On the next shelves, the records had been placed in beige files and spanned the next decade until 1970. Louise walked over to a slightly smaller bookcase behind the door and found that it was for the residents who were born in the last ten years of the institution, from 1970 to 1980. Some of them must have still been quite young when Eliselund closed down, she thought.

  “Here it is,” Eik said, pointing to an index tab projecting between the beige files. “Nineteen sixty-two.”

  Louise walked over and stood next to him to see. He had started pulling out files one by one in order to read the white label on each front page.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if you take them out?” she suggested. “Let me take some of them and then we can quickly look through them all.”

  He pulled a stack of files from the shelf; there were about twenty from that year. Louise took half of them and brought them over to where the light shone from a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. She squatted down with the files on her lap. There were both men and women, all of them born in 1962. Erik, Lise, Mik, Søren, Hanne, Lone, Mette, Vibeke, Ole, Hans-Henrik…

  She put the pile down on the floor so she wouldn’t get them mixed up. Eik brought the rest of the files over and squatted next to her.

  “Apparently the residents came from all across Zealand,” he noted as he quickly leafed through his pile, which had almost all boys.

  There was no Lisemette in the records that Louise had, either.

  “Agnete Eskildsen wasn’t a hundred percent sure of the birth year,” she said. “Let’s get the year before and after.”

  “I’ll take the early ones,” Eik suggested.

  Louise wasn’t listening. She had picked up an old black-and-white photograph that had slipped out of one of the files when she got up. She walked over to the light and looked at the young girl’s face and naked torso. All of one side was peeling and nearly raw. In the few spots where the skin remained, it was heavily blistered. The girl lay with her eyes closed in a hospital bed, a white pillow under her head.

  Eik had brought another volume from the shelf and was about to open the first file.

  “I think she’s here.” Louise replaced the stack of patient records on the floor in order to find the one to which the photo belonged. “I just need to find her.”

  She put the file for Erik aside and opened Lise’s record. “Look!”

  There were more photographs of the disfigured girl, including some in which the wound had started to heal. The damage to the tissue was so severe that it looked white and thick in several places. The skin stretching from the cheekbone and out toward her temple in particular was still rough and swollen with scabs. The shoulder was badly damaged as well.

  “Lise Andersen, born August six, 1962,” Louise read off, picking up the file. It didn’t say much about the scar except that the accident had happened in 1970. So the girl had been around eight years old, Louise concluded, quickly scanning the pages. In the back of the file, two forms from the home’s sick ward were attached.

  Louise removed the paper clip and saw that Lise Andersen had had surgery to treat an umbilical hernia when she was five. The year after the accident, she had sustained a fracture to her left arm. Both were completely consistent with Flemming’s observations during the autopsy.

  “It’s her.” She replaced the clip before handing the medical record to Eik. “Her civil registration number is at the top right corner. Write that down, would you?”

  Quickly she leafed through the final pages to find the girl’s basic information and learned that her parents had lived in Borup when the girl was admitted to the institution.

  “She has a sister,” she read aloud and stood up to get closer to the light. “A twin sister named Mette.”

  Eik put the medical record back into the file on the floor and came over to read together with her. He positioned himself so closely behind Louise that she could feel the heat from his body in the cold basement.

  “I saw the sister’s name in the pile I went through.”

  “Did you find it?” she asked to make him back off a little.

  “Lisemette,” he said as he found the record in the pile. “Lise and Mette—there were two of them! Then I’ll write down her civil registration number as well—”

  “She’s dead,” Louise cut in, astonished. “Lise Andersen died February twenty-seven, 1980.”

  “Nineteen eighty?” Eik repeated uncomprehendingly and brought over the sister’s file. “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a death certificate in the back of the file, and according to that she died thirty-one years ago, six months shy of her eighteenth birthday.”

  Louise knelt down and spread out the few pictures from the file on the floor.

  The girl had dark hair, and the prominent scar covered the exact same area as on the body she had seen at the Department of Forensic Medicine. She also thought she recognized the uninjured side of the face. The same delicate features.

  “But that makes no sense,” she said, bewildered, and asked to see the sister’s file.

  Eik leaned in to read along.

  “Mette Andersen,” she read. The two sisters were admitted to the institution together. Louise turned to the back of the file, letting the records slip out and fall to the floor as she pulled out one more death certificate.

  “They died on the same day,” she noted with puzzlement and accepted Eik’s outreached hand as she went to stand back up. “February twenty-seven, 1980.”

  Eik looked as if he had completely checked out.

  “Not only did they die on the same day,” Louise continued, “they died at almost the same time, nine fifty-six a.m. and nine fifty-seven a.m.”

  “So the woman with the scar is long dead?” he asked, confused.

  “Looks like it,” Louise said. “But we know that she couldn’t have been because she’s still in cold storage at the Department of Forensic Medicine.”

  She quickly leafed through the files, stripping them of whatever looked useful at first glance. She replaced the rest so the files were not left empty.

  “We’d better leave something in there in case we need to get a warrant in order to gain official access to the information,” she said, sticking the papers and death certificates in her bag. “Let’s get out of here.” She helped Eik put the records back on the shelf.

  “But how could she already be dead?” he tried again.

  Louise shook her head. She didn’t have an answer.

  “Any luck?” a voice sounded behind them.

  Louise could tell that Eik was in a rush to leave so she stopped and turned aroun
d to avoid giving the impression that they were running away.

  “It was a big help,” she said, thanking the woman and smiling. “Now we’ve got a few things to go on.”

  “So was it her?” the gray-haired lady asked, her hand on the light switch to keep the light from going out.

  “We think so,” Louise said. “And now we’re going to contact her family.”

  She started walking down the hall to signal that they needed to get going.

  “Well, good luck,” the woman called out behind them. “I’ll keep the light on until you’ve made it upstairs.”

  RIGHT UNTIL THE end, Louise had feared running into the cranky hag she had spoken to over the phone, so once they were safely in the car she felt like it had been a bit too easy. As they drove over the hill, thoughts were buzzing in her head; she couldn’t decide in what order to proceed.

  “I’ll call Hanne and have her check the twins in the Civil Registration System,” Eik said, breaking the silence. He already had his phone to his ear and the notepad on his lap. “If she was declared dead at age seventeen like it says, it would be in the official register as well.”

  Louise nodded, concentrating on the narrow country road while feeling completely convinced that the woman she had seen on the autopsy table was Lise Andersen. It was perfectly plausible that the dead woman was forty-nine years old, she thought, and asked Eik to locate Lise’s parents. Surely they would know if they had buried their two daughters.

  “Did we bring the photos of our Jane Doe?” she asked as they were parked at a rest stop outside Ringsted waiting for Hanne to call them back and tell them whether the twins’ parents were still alive and, if so, where they lived.

  Eik laboriously pulled two folded-up sheets of paper from his back pocket. “I printed them out before we left. Maybe you should call the guys at the Center of Forensic Services and the Department of Forensic Medicine and give them her civil registration number,” he suggested. “They should be able to find medical or dental records once they have something to go by. That is, if they still exist.”

  He pulled out his pack of cigarettes and was about to roll down the window.

  “All the way out,” Louise demanded, and told him that she would make the call. “But I’m not sure if that stuff is saved that long after someone is dead. In 1980 there were no computer archives, of course, so it seems like they should have been in the records we found if they still exist.”

  “Were they?” he asked through the open car door.

  Louise shrugged. “I actually didn’t notice, and I don’t think we should go back until we know if it’s necessary.”

  The opening notes of Pink Floyd’s The Wall sounded when Hanne called back.

  Louise watched Eik with curiosity as he wrote something down, asking Rønholt’s secretary to repeat the last part.

  “Thanks, gorgeous,” he flattered before tossing the cell phone onto the front seat. “They’re both reported as dead in the national register.”

  “What about their parents—are they still alive?”

  Eik looked at the notes he had taken while talking. “The father is. Viggo Andersen lives in Dåstrup, which according to your good friend Hanne is just outside Viby Sjælland.”

  “We’ll go talk to him,” Louise decided, already setting up the GPS.

  “Hell no,” he objected. “We’re not going to see a father who lost both of his daughters more than thirty years ago and ask him to confirm that they’re dead.”

  His hand darted to the leather string he wore around his neck and he started tugging at the yellowed shark’s tooth that hung from it.

  “Of course we are,” she decided. “And that father did not lose his daughters thirty years ago. One of them is in the basement of the Department of Forensic Medicine right now. We need to speak with him.”

  “We don’t know for certain whether our Jane Doe is identical with one of those twins,” he insisted. “We only have our information from one person, who knew her a long time ago, and from guesswork based on a patient record. To me, that’s not enough to make an identification.”

  Louise turned toward him irritably.

  “But it is to me,” she insisted, feeling convinced that she was right. “She has the same scar on her face, the same fracture on her left arm, and she’s had surgery to treat an umbilical hernia. That can’t all be a coincidence. Of course it’s the same person, and the father needs to identify her. And besides, he might know where she’s been hiding for the past thirty years.”

  12

  THE PLACE WAS a yellow-washed, three-winged farm with a thatched roof and a well-kept garden with large rhododendrons in bloom. From the road, Louise had spotted a man walking around the yard with a wheelbarrow and thought from his age that he might be the father. They pulled into the courtyard and parked next to an old-fashioned well pump. Everything was so well maintained that it was obvious that someone with plenty of time looked after the property.

  “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to have the wound of his daughters’ deaths reopened,” Eik grumbled, having otherwise stayed quiet for most of the drive. He let Louise lead the way to the yard through a narrow passage between the main building and one of the wings, and she realized that he was simply uneasy about the situation.

  “Don’t you think he’d be more upset if he wasn’t informed of the fact that his daughter is at the Department of Forensic Medicine waiting to be buried?” she whispered over her shoulder.

  “I suppose you’re right. Let’s get this over with.”

  Just then the elderly man came walking toward them. He had put down his wheelbarrow and placed his rake atop a pile of freshly cut grass.

  “Can I help you?” he asked in a welcoming voice.

  Louise put out her hand. “My name is Louise Rick and this is my colleague Eik Nordstrøm. We’re from the Search Department with the National Police. Are you Viggo Andersen?”

  “Yes.” The man looked at them with curiosity.

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions if that’s okay.”

  “Ask away,” he said readily.

  “Can we step inside?” Eik suggested, tipping his chin toward the house.

  “Of course,” Viggo Andersen said and gestured for them to follow. After opening the kitchen door, he held back a German pointer. “He’s harmless but he just gets so excited around strangers.”

  “That’s all right,” Eik said and scratched the dog behind the ears. Louise was able to make do with just a quick pat for the pointer, who was wagging his tail and attempting to show his excitement by jumping up.

  Eik kept a firm grip on his collar while the older man showed the way through the kitchen and into the living room.

  “Did someone go missing?” he asked after putting the dog in the scullery and offering them a seat at the dining table.

  “Yes, but a long time ago,” Louise answered, looking around the charming living room.

  “Can I offer you anything?”

  “No, thank you,” Eik quickly replied. Louise shook her head as well.

  “We have a couple of questions about your daughter Lise,” she began once the father was seated opposite them.

  Viggo Andersen looked at her in surprise.

  “About Lise?” he repeated. A furrowed net of wrinkles slipped across his forehead, and his look turned to puzzlement. “What do you need to know after all these years?”

  Louise decided that she might as well cut right to the chase.

  “We have reason to believe that your daughter did not die at Eliselund in 1980, and we have some questions and a photograph we’d like to show you.”

  She could tell from the look Eik shot in her direction that he was not crazy about the “we.” He clearly wanted her to speak for herself.

  “What do you mean she didn’t die?” Viggo Andersen asked, clearly confused.

  Louise took a deep breath and asked Eik to show him the picture he had brought.

  “Last week a woman was found dead in a fores
t here on central Zealand. She had a very distinctive scar, which is identical to the one your daughter had on the right side of her face and on her shoulder.”

  Viggo Andersen sat motionless and listened.

  “There were details discovered during the autopsy that also suggest this might be the same person: a broken bone in her forearm and a surgical scar from an umbilical hernia. Mr. Andersen, we understand this is quite a lot to take in after all these years, but we believe that the woman who was found in the woods is likely your daughter.”

  The father turned pale while Louise spoke. He seemed to be in shock as he leaned forward and tried to make sense of it all.

  “But… how could this be?” he stammered, shaking his head. “This can’t be right. You must be mistaken. I was notified back then and the girls’ belongings were sent home to me. Everything fit in just a couple of shoe boxes; that’s all they had.”

  Eik smoothed the two sheets of paper on the table and pushed them forward a little.

  “The letter said it was pneumonia that claimed their lives,” the father continued and swallowed with difficulty. “So why would you be coming around now telling me this?”

  Louise dreaded this part of the job. Though they were going purely on instinct at this point, this man seemed to be truly stunned—completely caught off-guard. But they needed to lay hands on what he knew and could contribute to their investigation. They had to push, no matter how painful it might be. And she had to maintain a professional composure, even if she seemed cold and unfeeling.

  “It does seem strange,” Louise conceded. She asked him to look at the photograph. “I know it’s been years and your daughter’s all grown up,” she added before asking if the dead woman in the photograph might be Lise Andersen.

  The elderly man accepted the copies and leaned in, his reaction evident on his face. He pressed his lips together to suppress it but then started nodding, a look of puzzlement in his eyes.

  “You recognize the scar?” Louise concluded.