by Willow Rose
And I knew exactly how I was going to do it.
After dropping Julie off at her school the next morning I drove to the nearest furniture store before I drove to the newspaper. I bought a desk and a chair and brought it all with me in the car. Then I bought a laptop in another store and called Sune and asked him to meet me in front of the newspaper. When I arrived, he stood outside and was waving at me. I asked him to help me get it all up the stairs.
Inside in the editorial room we put the desk and chair down and unpacked it. It needed to be put together, so Sune helped me, while Sara looked at us in disbelief.
Finally when it was done we placed the desk next to mine and I smiled at Sune.
”Congratulations, this is your new workspace,” I said to him.
He looked at me.
”What?”
”I want you to work with me on this case.”
“How?”
”I need you to monitor the police work. Check the files, read the autopsy reports and so on.”
His eyes were now big and wide. ”Are you kidding me?”
”Nope.”
“You want me to hack into the police’s main server and look at their files. Are you insane?”
“I might be.”
Sune sighed loudly.
”I would love to—you know I really love that stuff—but I can’t … I mean if the police caught me … Once is one thing but several times makes the possibility of being caught so much bigger.”
“How would they ever know? You said so yourself, that you were good at it, that you could do it without leaving a trace. I bought you a brand new laptop. It belongs to the paper, so we will all get in trouble if anyone found out.”
Sune scratched his head. ”I don’t know…”
I suddenly felt bad pushing him into doing something illegal. I didn’t want him to get in trouble because of me that was for sure.
”You know what? It was a bad idea.” I closed the laptop. I sat down at my own desk. “Just forget it.”
I opened my own laptop and checked my e-mails. Sune stood for a long time and stared at the empty desk. Then he sat down.
“Okay, but only on this case,” he said. “Never again.”
I smiled and handed him the laptop. “That’s a promise.”
It didn’t take Sune long to find the autopsy reports of the two murders. He opened the files and showed it to me. Starting with Didrik Rosenfeldt’s. It made me sick to my stomach. I was about to vomit when I saw the pictures of Didrik Rosenfeldt’s body. The housekeeper had been right in her description. It did look like a wild beast had ripped his body apart. It didn’t look like something a human being would be capable of doing. The body was almost unrecognizable. Only the red hair revealed it was Didrik Rosenfeldt.
I studied the pictures for awhile and Sune helped me, even though I could tell his stomach had a hard time too. It took us a little longer than it probably should have, but finally we looked at each other.
“Look at the cuts,” I said and pointed at Didrik Rosenfeldt’s chest.
”It looks exactly like …” Sune said but stopped.
“I know. Like the ones on Irene Hansen’s chest. Except these seem deeper.”
“Exactly.”
”What does that mean?”
Sune shook his head. ”I don’t know. Could it be the same guy, maybe? The same one who dressed up like Freddy Krueger and mutilated her body?”
“That sounds possible. But why? As far as her story goes they were all very good friends on that boat.”
“I know.”
”Let’s look at Henrik Holch’s file.” I noted on a piece of paper the cause of Didrik Rosenfeldt’s death was described in his file as death by stabbing.
With a few clicks Sune found the other file.
”This one is not much better,” he said before opening it.
I nodded. I figured that.
The pictures on the screen were awful. But it didn’t look like Didrik Rosenfeldt’s or the cuts on Irene Hansen. That disappointed me. Maybe the police were right after all. Maybe there was no other connection between the two killings than the fact that they went to the same school. Could that really be a coincidence? I didn’t believe it one bit. The killer had just changed his pattern. His modus operandi, as the police called it. Maybe he had a reason for doing it. I asked Sune to let me read the rest of the file and he found it for me.
Apparently the killer had cut off Henrik Holch’s private parts, castrated him so to speak. And then he had left him tied up to a chair, bleeding to death.
I leaned back in the chair. What a way to leave this world. But why did the killer choose that exact way of killing Henrik Holch? Why not just rip his body like Didrik Rosenfeldt? Did he have a reason? I scrolled in the file and found my answer.
“Bingo,” I said.
“What?” Sune looked at me.
“He was a pedophile.”
“How do you know?”
I pointed at a line on the screen.
“He was killed while watching child porn on his flat-screen TV.”
Sune looked impressed.
“So you think the killer chose a different way of killing Henrik Holch because he was into having sex with children? “
“Yes.”
“Like a punishment?”
“Something like that.”
“So the first one was a bastard treating people poorly, having several affairs and just being a real prick all of his life, while the second one was a disgusting pedophile. Both of them had been involved in the rape of Irene Hansen.”
“Exactly.”
”So someone is actually doing the world a favor?”
“You can put it like that, yes.”
I paused before continuing. “The question is, which asshole will be next?”
CHAPTER 13
IN MY MIND, Irene Hansen could definitely be a suspect. She had the best motive for killing these guys, eliminating them one by one as revenge. But somehow I couldn’t really see that skinny quiet woman being able to take down these men all by herself. Maybe she wasn’t alone? She had a husband. Maybe he could have helped her. It was certainly a possibility.
My plan now was to find the rest of the men in the picture. To my surprise, headquarters loved my story about Didrik Rosenfeldt and wanted to run it in the morning paper. I expected to hear from Junior immediately after that. I cleared it with my editor and told him about the unpleasant visit the other day, but he said that I shouldn’t be thinking about that. The Rosenfeldts did own the company that owned the newspaper, but they weren’t supposed to be meddling in the editorial decisions. They had to go through him first, he said.
So I promised him another story about the six boarding school boys who raped Irene Hansen, a follow-up story to the first article. A “where are they now?” kind of article. I liked the idea. They raped a local girl, got away with it, and now they were living the sweet life of rich men.
“Make a small profile of each of them. The public will be interested in knowing who we have running around in our country, who they really are, especially since they all are very influential,” my editor said.
So I was free to go after the boarding school boys.
I couldn’t ask them about the rape. I had promised Irene not to blow her cover. She was hiding from them and told her story anonymously. But I could ask them about the two guys who were already dead.
It didn’t take Sune long to find the first one, Ulrik Gyldenlove. He lived in Klampenborg in northern Zeeland, north of Copenhagen the richest part of the country. I called him and told him I was doing a story about two of his old friends from school. I wanted to talk to him about them, and much to my surprise, he agreed to meet with me.
We were to meet at Mattssons Riding Club next to Dyrehaven. It took about an hour and a half to get there. Dyrehaven was a famous area in Klampenborg. It was a big forest and had the richest animal wildlife in Denmark. It was famous for its many kinds of deer and especially for
a big hunt that takes place every first Sunday in November. Hubertusjagten, as it was called, was an old traditional hunt that was more than a hundred years old. It was inspired by the old traditional English hunts in England, with the riders wearing red jackets using of fox hounds. Nowadays they didn’t use the hounds any more or chase a real fox. Instead they had equipped two riders with a fox tail on the shoulder and then the rest of the riders were supposed to catch the tail.
The event was always broadcast on TV and people would flock to the park to see the hunt every year. Some of the riders always ended up in an especially muddy pond. People would gather around the pond in order to see who it would be this year who would end their hunt in a pile of mud, ruining the nice red jacket.
Ulrik Gyldenlove had just finished riding his horse for the day together with his daughter and they both got off when I approached them and told who I was. I told Sune to take some pictures of him with his beautiful horse and we chatted briefly with his twenty-year-old daughter before we went for a walk in the forest.
A fog was everywhere and it felt cold and damp on the skin. Between the trees I now and then spotted movement. I couldn’t tell if it was a deer or another animal, but there was definitely something in there.
Ulrik Gyldenlove had only lost a bit of his hair since the picture was taken at the port. He had gotten older and wasn’t as slim as back then. But I recognized the look in his eyes, and his smile when he now and then showed me one. He seemed burdened, as though life had been hard on him. That surprised me. I had expected him to be more like Didrik Rosenfeldt, caring more for himself than others. But this guy was different.
As we walked slowly along a path in the forest looking at the wildlife, he sighed deeply.
“This is my favorite spot in the whole world,” he said and took in a deep breath of the moist air. “So quiet and calm.”
I nodded. It was truly beautiful.
He looked at me with a smile.
“So how did you know I used to be friends with Didrik and Henrik? I haven’t seen any of them in ages. We can hardly call each other friends anymore.”
“Why haven’t you seen each other for so long?” I asked deliberately avoiding answering his question.
“Oh, I don’t know. It has been so many years. Time flies. We went to the same school for years and I have tried to watch everybody’s careers from a distance, but we never saw each other since the day we graduated.”
“Why do you think that is?”
He shook his head. “We were just school buddies. We really didn’t have that much in common.”
We walked down the path for awhile in silence. Then I took out Irene’s picture from the pocket in my brown leather jacket. I showed it to him.
He stopped and stared at it for a long time.
”How did you get that picture?” He said.
“It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you seem to be much more than just school buddies in this picture.”
He sighed deeply and put a hand to his forehead. He seemed a bit preoccupied for a second.
“What is it you want from me?” he asked.
“I want to know about your friends. What were they like? My sister used to date Didrik Rosenfeldt for a short while and she told me you and your friends acted out a lot when you came to Karrebaeksminde on summer vacation in the Rosenfeldt’s residence. That you harassed people on the port area, and I know that you were at one point accused of having raped a girl on the boat.”
Ulrik Gyldenlove sighed again.
“I just want to know the truth,” I continued.
“You must do your research a little better next time,” he said handing me the picture back. “The charges were all dropped. There was no case against us. They were false accusations. The poor girl must have been mentally ill or something.”
“It was dropped because you paid her family off. Don’t think I didn’t do my research,” I said, suddenly afraid of having said too much. Would they come after Irene for this?
He sighed again. “It’s such a long time ago. Why dig up the past now? Why can’t you just leave it alone?”
“Because someone is killing your old school buddies and it might be because of something you did back then. For all I know you might be next.”
He looked at me with serious eyes. “Don’t you think I have been asking myself that?”
CHAPTER 14
ULRIK GYLDENLOVE was quiet for a long period of time while we were still walking on the path. I had borrowed a pair of Wellies at the Riding Club and they made a funny squelching sound when I walked. We reached Erimitageslottet, a small castle that never was used for the royalties to live in, but as a place for the king to have his banquet for the riders of the hunt. It was placed on the highest point of the forest overlooking all of the beautiful landscape.
It had a big history. I sensed that as we passed it.
“Most of the other students were afraid of that group,” he said suddenly without looking at me. He stared out in the wide landscape that opened up between the trees. A flock of deer were gathered not far from us. One looked up and stared back at us.
“They enjoyed it. They liked to make people scared of them,” he continued. ”The school was their domain. And a lot of the other students got a taste of their tough love. They had a reputation of being like wild animals.”
“What do you mean by they ‘got a taste of their tough love’?”
“They beat them up. Sometimes half to death.”
“Why?”
He looked at me. “For fun.” He looked away again. ”They got some kind of pleasure out of it. Sometimes there was no reason at all for them to pick on some poor kid and beat the crap out of him. He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“What is there to understand? They were just pure evil. They wanted to be evil.”
“But weren’t they afraid to be kicked out of the school? Didn’t their parents send them there to get a good education and a bright future?”
“You don’t know a lot about boarding schools do you?”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
“Boarding schools are used for rich parents to get rid of their kids. Sending them to boarding school means they don’t have to deal with them any longer. Most rich parents are emotionally inadequate, almost disabled. Because their own parents didn’t love them, they are not capable of loving their children. Then they ship them off to boarding school and only have to spend time with them on the holidays. And even then they will be too busy for them. So they are left to themselves. Rich and merciless. Without any compassion for other human beings since they haven’t gotten any growing up. That’s the life of most boarding school kids. They did indeed want to amount to something. But they knew they would on account of their parents. And everybody knew if you wanted to be someone when school was over, you’d better not have pissed these guys off while you were in the school. If you were friends with Didrik Rosenfeldt you would surely amount to something later in life.”
“But you are not like that. You are different, why?”
“I broke off with them in 1986. Told them I didn’t want to be a part of their game anymore. It was over for me.”
“Game?”
He sighed again. I sensed that he had been running from this story most of his adult life, thinking he could escape it, but now it had caught up on him.
“They had a game called ‘A Gentleman Hunt.’”
“A Gentleman Hunt? What was that?
“It was a game that Didrik Rosenfeldt invented. One of the guys would come up with a fantasy and they would go out and make it real. Like raping the girl while dressed as Freddy Krueger. It was a challenge. Someone would challenge the rest of the group to do something awful and then they had to do it. If one refused they would be beaten up and thrown out of the game. To be excluded from the group meant no protection. You were certain to be their next victim.”
“How did he co
me up with that?”
“One time he told us he had this fantasy about scaring the shit out of a boy in eighth grade, and then he told the rest of the group what he wanted to do to him, and then they all went out and did it.”
“What did they do?”
“The kid was from the U.S. He had lost his parents in a car accident and had this one picture of them he always kept close to him, in his pocket. Didrik and the rest took the picture from him one afternoon in the boys’ bathroom. They took it from his clothes while the kid was in the shower. When he came out all naked they showed him they had taken it. He wanted it back and started crying, but they didn’t care. They stuck the picture in his mouth and lit it on fire. He was to hold it like that. If he dropped it they would shoot him, they said and placed a gun to the boy’s head. As the picture burned the crying boy eventually burned himself and dropped the burning picture to the floor.”
“Then what?”
“Then they pulled the trigger. But it clicked. It wasn’t loaded.”
“Wow. That was tough.”
“The boy had to leave the school after that.”
“What about Didrik Rosenfeldt and his gang?”
“Their parents paid the victim off and they continued their lives. And this was just the beginning. Now they started picking on all the new students who came to the school. Challenging each other in various fantasies and making them real.”
“Someone must have been complaining about them to the headmaster.”
“Some did every once in a while. And they paid the price for it. I remember one in particular who told on the boys and they hung him from the ceiling in the gym, by his arms. Then they beat him all night like a punching ball. He had to spend six months in the hospital. And he never told anyone who did it.”
Ulrik looked up and spotted a falcon looking for food on the ground. He pointed at it and I saw it too. The fog had gotten lighter and we could now see more of the forest.
“Did they pick on you?” I asked.