She nodded. “I’ll give it some thought, certainly.”
“Your own case was probably the first of many in which Curt Wad succeeded in making a mockery of the truth and turning matters to his own advantage with scant regard for the injustice he thereby occasioned. If charges were to be brought against Curt Wad, it’d be highly likely you’d be called as a witness. How would you feel about that?”
“About taking the stand against Curt Wad? Oh, no, I wouldn’t care for that at all. All that’s water under the bridge for me now. Justice will catch up with him without my involvement. Beelzebub is most likely rubbing his hands with glee as we speak.”
“We quite understand, Nete,” said Assad, leaning forward and looking as though he was about to pour himself another cup.
Carl stopped him with a movement of his hand.
“Perhaps we’ll speak again soon, Nete. Thanks for the tea and hospitality,” he said, informing Assad with a nod that the audience was over. If they got a move on he might just be able to nip home for a change of clothes before seeing if his new key to Mona’s chambers worked like it was supposed to.
Assad offered his thanks, swiping another cookie in the process, the quality of which he praised before suddenly raising a finger into the air.
“Just a minute, Carl. There was one more person we did not ask about.” He turned to face Nete Hermansen. “A fisherman from Lundeborg went missing, too. His name was Viggo Mogensen. Would that by any chance be anyone you ever ran into? From Lundeborg to Sprogø is not far in a boat.”
She smiled. “No, I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him.”
• • •
“You look tensive, Carl. What is going on inside your head?”
“Pensive, Assad. There’s no such word as tensive. But apart from that, there’s a lot to think about, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would say so, yes. I cannot get my head around this either, Carl. Apart from this Viggo Mogensen, it’s like there are two cases in one: Rita and Gitte and Curt Wad and Nørvig and Nete on the one side. Here, the cousin, Tage, seems not to fit in, not having anything to do with Sprogø as far as we know. But then on the other side there is Tage and Nete. This means she is the only one who has something to do with all of them.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right, Assad, though we’ve no way of knowing for sure. Maybe Curt Wad ties it all together in some way. That’s what we need to delve into now. The idea of some collective suicide, or a coincidence of inexplicable, simultaneous accidents somehow isn’t on my agenda anymore.”
“Say again, Carl. Agenda, and what kind of accidents?”
“Forget it, Assad. We’ll talk about it later.”
29
SPROGØ, 1955 / COPENHAGEN, September 1987
A flock of women stood on the jetty, waving as though Nete and Rita were long-awaited friends. They seemed like children, boisterous and giggling, spick and span. And Nete didn’t understand.
What did they have to smile about? The boat from Nyborg was no lifeboat come to save them. It wasn’t a Noah’s Ark to sail them off to sanctuary. Quite the opposite, from what she’d heard. The boat was a curse.
Nete looked out over the railing at the lighthouse on its hill, and then beyond, at the cluster of red-roofed buildings with yellow walls, their windows like eyes watching over the island landscape and the poor souls upon it. A pair of French doors in the middle building swung open and a small, erect figure appeared on the step, one hand firmly placed on the handrail. An admiral to welcome the fleet, or rather Sprogø’s queen monitoring her realm. She who reigned supreme.
“Have you brought cigarettes?” was the first thing the girls shouted out to them. One even clambered out and took up position on the wooden pilings with arms outstretched. If they had, she’d be first in line.
The girls milled around the new arrivals like a chorus of cackling geese. Names resounded in the air, hands sought contact.
Nete glanced at Rita with concern, but Rita was in her element. Rita had cigarettes, and cigarettes were the pathway to the top of the hierarchy. She lifted the packets above her head to show them off, then returned them just as quickly to her pocket. No wonder she was the one with all the attention.
• • •
Nete was given a room up under the sloping roof. A single skylight was her window on the world. The place was chilly, the wind worming its way through the rickety window frame. There were two beds and the little suitcase belonging to her roommate. Had it not been for a crucifix and two small photographs of film stars she didn’t recognize, it would have seemed like a prison cell.
The room was one in a row of many, and outside the door was a terrazzo trough in which they washed.
Throughout her childhood Nete had toiled mucking out the stalls, but she had never been less than thorough with her hygiene, scrubbing her arms and hands with a stiff brush and the rest of her body with the sponge.
“You must be the cleanest kid in the world,” Tage always used to say.
But here ablutions took place at the trough amid a tumult of activity that made it difficult to wash properly. The girls stood there all at once, stripped to the waist, washing frenziedly with only five minutes allocated. The same soap flakes as at Brejning that made their hair stiff like helmets and quite as undecorative. Moreover, they made a person smell worse than before they washed.
The rest of the day was marked out by the ringing of the bell, a set timetable, discipline. Nete hated the place and kept to herself as much as possible, the same way she’d done in her foster home. The advantage was that she could grieve over her fate in peace, and yet one all-consuming shadow prevailed: Sprogø was an island from which escape seemed inconceivable. Perhaps some friendly soul among the staff or a good friend among the girls might have made her time there more tolerable, but the women who watched over them were bossy and obnoxious, and Rita had enough on her own to keep her busy, wheeling and dealing and hustling her way up the ladder, eventually to rule the roost over her simple underlings like a regent upon a throne.
The bed opposite Nete’s belonged to a feeble-minded girl who blathered on about little children. Jesus had given her a doll, and if she looked after it well enough she would one day be rewarded with a child of her own, she kept insisting. She was beyond all reason, but many of the other girls were bright enough. One of them wanted dearly to be able to read, but the staff poked fun at her, dismissing her wish as a “luxury” and packing her off to work.
Nete worked, too. She had asked to be in the stables, but her request was declined. While Rita spent her days in the washhouse, boiling clothes and larking about with the other girls, Nete was in the kitchen, peeling vegetables and scrubbing pots. When she tired and began to work more slowly, to pause and gaze out of the window, she became an easy target. The wardens and the other girls would pick on her. And when one girl threatened her with a knife and shoved her to the floor, Nete returned the provocation by hurling a scalding hot lid in her face and kicking a dent in a saucepan. And thus she was summoned to the matron’s office for the first time.
The matron and her office were as one body. She aloof, the room cold and impersonal, its contents ordered systematically. Shelves of binders to one side, filing cabinets to the other. In these archives, human destinies were neatly arranged, ready to be taken out, assessed, and dismissed.
“They say you’re causing trouble in the kitchen,” the matron said, wagging a finger of admonishment.
“Then send me to the stables. I’ll behave myself there,” Nete replied, watching the flutter of the woman’s hands on the desk. These hands were a window. Through them a person could read the matron’s thoughts, said Rita. And she ought to know, from all the times she’d been called in herself.
Piercing eyes glared at her. “There’s one thing you should know, Nete. We are not in the business of handing out privileges to make life easier. In spite of your wicke
d characters and feeble minds, our aim is to teach you that even such things as provide no pleasure in life may nonetheless be endured to great benefit. You are here in order that you may learn to get on as human beings and not as the animals you have hitherto emulated. Is that understood?”
Nete shook her head almost imperceptibly, barely registering the movement herself. But the matron was alert, and suddenly the fluttering hands were still.
“I might choose to interpret this reaction as impertinence, Nete, but for the moment I shall take it to be a sign that you are merely a dimwit, simple and empty-headed.” She straightened up in her chair. Her upper body was plump. Most certainly not an object of desire for the majority of men.
“I shall place you in needlework instead. Some months earlier than is right and proper, but the kitchen doesn’t want you any longer.”
“Yes, Matron,” said Nete, eyes fastened to the floor.
The sewing room could hardly be worse, she thought, but she was wrong.
The work itself was OK, though she was somewhat inept at lacemaking and hemming sheets. The worst part was being with the other girls. Stuck in a room with all their chatter and nonsense. One minute they could be the best of friends, the next they were at one another’s throats.
Nete was aware that there were many things in life of which she was ignorant. Places and history, general knowledge. Having such a poor grasp of letters and numbers meant she was compelled to pay particular heed to whatever information came to her by word of mouth, and Nete had been around few people in her life who’d been able to capture her attention in this way.
She had become skilled in the art of not listening, but in the sewing room this was no longer an option. The inconsequential chatter that filled the room drove her up the wall. Ten hours, every day.
“Grethe, be a good girl and hand me the reel, would you?” one of them might say, only for Grethe to spit back: “What do you think I am, you brainless nitwit? Your housekeeper?”
And so it was that the mood could change from one moment to the next. And all but Nete and the girl on the receiving end would fall about laughing as invective flew through the air, until just as suddenly they made friends again and the chatter resumed, the same stories over and over.
But apart from the paucity of cigarettes, rumors of handsome men in boats, and terrifying tales of the surgeon and his scalpel over in Korsør, there was little to talk about.
“I’m going out of my mind here,” she whispered to Rita in the courtyard one day before lunch.
Rita looked her up and down as though she were an item on a grocer’s shelf. “I’ll see to it we get a room together. Then I can cheer you up a bit.”
That same evening Nete’s roommate was injured in an accident and had to be sailed over to the hospital in Korsør. They said she’d got too close to the cauldron in the washhouse and it was her own fault. She was stupid and clumsy, and her head was empty save for silliness and her little doll-child.
They heard her screams all the way over in the sewing room. Nete didn’t know what to think.
• • •
Rita moved into Nete’s room, and laughter returned to her life, for a short time at least. Funny stories were even funnier when Rita told them, and she was good at collecting them. But Rita’s company had its price, and Nete discovered what it was on the very first night.
She protested, but Rita was strong and forced her. And when Nete gasped with delight, she resigned herself to the situation.
“You keep your mouth shut, Nete. If this gets out, you’re done for, understand?” Rita hissed. And Nete understood.
Rita was not only strong of body, but of mind as well, much more so than Nete. Though Rita loathed being on the island, she never seemed to doubt that some brighter future lay ahead. She was convinced that one day she would find a way to escape, and until she did, she knew better than anyone how to make her life comfortable.
She wangled the best jobs and was always first served at table. She smoked cigarettes behind the washhouse, cavorted with Nete by night, and was regent in the day.
“Where do you get those cigarettes from, anyway?” Nete asked once in a while, never receiving an answer until the night in spring when she caught Rita climbing out of bed, putting on her clothes, and unlatching the door, quiet as a mouse.
The alarms will go off any minute, Nete thought to herself. In all the doors was a little pin that popped out when the door was opened, activating a bell and summoning enraged staff to mete out frenzied blows and enforce a cooling-off in one of the contemplation rooms, as they called the punishment cells. But the bell did not ring, for Rita had jammed the mechanism.
When Rita disappeared along the corridor, Nete got up to see what she had done, discovering a piece of wire, ingeniously bent, that could be twisted into the pinhole when opening the door. It was simple as that.
It took Nete less than ten seconds to pull on her dress and sneak off down the corridor after her roommate, heart pounding in her chest. One creak of a floorboard, one squeak of an unoiled hinge and all hell would break loose. But Rita had shown the way.
Reaching the outer door, she found it unlocked, Rita again having circumvented security.
From a distance she saw the figure slip past the henhouse and down through the meadow, as though she knew every stone, every pool of mud in the darkness.
There was no doubt Rita was on her way to “the Retreat,” as the girls called the little house farthest away, facing west. It was where the most well-behaved girls were allowed to spend their daytime hours in what was referred to as holiday week. In olden days it had been “The Plague House,” a place where sailors with contagious diseases were sent into quarantine. As Nete discovered that night, it was a plague house still.
Several small boats with nets and fish crates were drawn up onto the shore and inside the Retreat flickered the faint light of a pair of paraffin lamps.
Nete crept forward with caution and peered in through the window. The sight that met her eyes astonished her. On one end of the little dining table were several cartons of cigarettes, and bent forward over the other end, hands flat against the surface, was Rita, her naked sex thrust back to allow the man at her rear to enter her with ease.
Behind him stood two other men, awaiting their turn. Their faces were flushed, wide eyes fixed on the sight before them. Three fishermen. And Nete knew the one on the right only too well.
It was Viggo Mogensen.
• • •
She recognized Viggo’s voice on the entry phone immediately. This time her heart was beating fast as she listened to the footsteps echoing up the stairwell. When she opened the door, she knew right away it would be harder this time.
He greeted her in a deep, warm voice, stepping past her into the hallway as though he were a familiar guest. He was still handsome, a man who could awaken feelings in a woman, just as he had done that day at the fair. His skin, once so weathered, now seemed finer, his hair gray and distinguished, softer-looking than before.
So soft, she thought she might run her fingers through it after she killed him.
30
November 2010
Carl awoke in a state of bewilderment, with no idea what day it was or why the bedroom reminded him of the bazaar in some concrete immigrant ghetto. Was that the waft of Assad’s syrupy hot beverages and leftover shawarmas that drifted into his nostrils, along with a repugnant hint of doctor’s surgeries?
He reached for his watch and discovered it was twenty-five past nine.
“Bollocks!” he spluttered, flinging back the duvet. Why hadn’t anyone got him up? Now Jesper would be late. Him, too, for that matter.
It took him less than five minutes to remove the grime of the day before and don some reasonably clean clothes. “Get a move on, Jesper!” he hollered, pounding his stepson’s door for the second time. “You’re late, and it’s your own
fault.”
“What’s up, Carl? You off to church? Service isn’t until ten,” Morten ventured cautiously. He was standing at the stove in his pajamas and his favorite apron, looking like something out of a comic.
“Morning, Carl,” came a voice from the front room. “Nice lie-in, eh?”
A breezy Mika clad in white from head to toe beamed a smile. In front of him, Hardy lay on his bed in the altogether, and on the cart at his side were two steaming bowls containing a liquid Mika was applying to the big man’s limp body with facecloths.
“Just getting Hardy freshened up. He said he thought he smelled a bit off, so now we’re giving him a combined camphor and menthol wash. That’ll get you all fragrant again, eh, Hardy?”
“Morning, Carl,” said the head at the end of the pale, gaunt frame.
Carl frowned, and at the same moment as Jesper roared from upstairs to the effect that Carl was the biggest idiot on earth, the realities of the Gregorian calendar dawned on him.
“It’s Sunday, you bloody idiot!” he reprimanded himself, burying his head in his hands. “What’s going on here, anyway? You opening a diner, Morten?” he inquired, with reference to the cooking smells that filled the house.
He closed his eyes and tried not to recall the downward-spiraling conversation he’d had with Mona the night before.
No, she was afraid he couldn’t come over to hers, because she was going over to see Mathilde, she’d said.
“Mathilde?” he’d asked. “Who’s Mathilde when she’s at home?” And could have punched himself on the nose for asking such a moronic question.
“Mathilde? Mathilde happens to be my eldest daughter,” she’d answered him with an iciness that had him writhing in his bed until daybreak. Bollocks. Had she ever actually told him her other daughter was called Mathilde? On the other hand, had he ever asked? Of course he hadn’t. And now the damage was done.
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