The Forgotten Girls

by Sara Blaedel

  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.

  LOUISE 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.

  SHE 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.”

  “SEXUAL ABNORMALITY,” EIK 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.

  EDITH ROSEN 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 discharge
d.

  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.”

  FROM 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.

  “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.”